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January 1st, 1998 Beyond Borders Kathleen Braden Seattle Pacific nU iversity

Wilbur Zelinsky

Sergei Rogachev

Thomas Baerwald

Aleksei Naumov Moscow State University

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Recommended Citation Braden, Kathleen; Zelinsky, Wilbur; Rogachev, Sergei; Baerwald, Thomas; Naumov, Aleksei; Florin, John; Krishchyunas, Raymond; Novikov, Aleksei; and Brunn, Stanley, "Beyond Borders" (1998). SPU Works. 2. https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/works/2

This Book is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ SPU. It has been accepted for inclusion in SPU Works by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ SPU. Authors Kathleen Braden, Wilbur Zelinsky, Sergei Rogachev, Thomas Baerwald, Aleksei Naumov, John Florin, Raymond Krishchyunas, Aleksei Novikov, and Stanley Brunn

This book is available at Digital Commons @ SPU: https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/works/2 Table of Contents Chapter American Themes Russian Themes Authors

Introduction Kathleen Braden

The Core The Urban Archipelago The Urban Island Wilbur Zelinsky Power of the Core Power from the Core Sergei Rogachev

The North A Difficult Environment A Difficult Environment Thomas Baerwald A Stubborn Culture A Stubborn Culture Aleksei Naumov Boston St Petersburg

The South Economies Based on Heritage of Injustice Economy Based on Social Injustice John Florin Race Relations: Preservation of Inequality Conservatism and Change Aleksei Naumov Cultural Conservatism

The Heartland Main Street U.S.A. Russia’s Main Street Thomas Baerwald The Ethnic Salad Bowl The Ethnic Salad Bowl Raymond Krishchyunas

Aleksei Novikov

The Crossroads The Crossroads of Cultures The Crossroads of Cultures Stanley Brunn Criss-Crossing the Volatile Region Criss-Crossing the Volatile Region Raymond Krishchyunas

The Breadbasket Agricultural Landscapes & Idealized Cultures Idealized Rural Landscapes Thomas Baerwald Government and Geometry on the Landscape Government and Geometry on the Landscape Aleksei Novikov Raymond Krishchyunas

The Old Mountains An Economy As Worn Down As the Mountains An Economy As Worn Down As the Mountains Stanley Brunn A Culture Walled Up In the Mountains A Culture Walled Up In the Mountains Sergei Rogachev

Tropical South Sun and Sin Economy Sun and Sin Economy Wilbur Zelinsky American Shore of the Turbulent Caribbean Storms Along the Black Sea Raymond Krishchyunas Chapter American Themes Russian Themes Authors

Mexistan The Dual Society The Dual Society Wilbur Zelinsky Wealth & Water Wealth & Water Raymond Krishchyunas

The Land Ocean The Frontier as Myth & Symbol The Frontier as Myth & Symbol Raymond Krishchyunas The Boom & Busts The BAM & Busts Aleksei Novikov John Florin Kathleen Braden

Pacific Edge Chasing a Rim of Growth Chasing a Rim of Growth Kathleen Braden Living on a Ring of Fire Living on a Ring of Fire Aleksei Novikov Raymond Krishchyunas

Conclusions The Places We Left Out Kathleen Braden The Last Place INTRODUCTION

Is it possible to look out over the Ural Mountains and see Appalachia? To find the character of the American West in the vast open space of Siberia? To smell the citrus and feel the warm sun of the Black Sea coast and be struck with a sense of Florida? This book is based on just such an idea: that we can look beyond our borders and discover fundamental realities about places that transcend differences of culture, language, and politics. Five American and four Russian geographers wrote this book to provide glimpses of understanding about the United States and Russia. Despite the size and power of our two nations and more than seventy years of cold war, we seem to have a meager comprehension of each other, perhaps because each country is so often viewed as a monolith and we emphasize our differences, rather than similarities. The authors of this book worked together in the hopes of overcoming some misimpressions of the past. Beyond Borders became an experiment - an attempt to compare the United States and Russia by pairing up and analyzing eleven regions. We have therefore taken the rather risky step of suggesting similarities between New England and Novgorod, between Odessa and New Orleans, between Moscow and New York. But perhaps the time has never been more appropriate for such a new approach to geography because so many people seem adrift on the changing world

1 map. In an era when established states are breaking up, new alliances are forming, and the very idea of state sovereignty is being transformed, we may begin to question whether all these lines on the map actually mean anything to people. Is there an underlying “real” geography which can provide an anchor? We believe that our regional scheme is somewhat like the well-trodden paths on our campuses. People have an innate sense of the best routes, even when architects lay out concrete sidewalks to the contrary. In writing our book, we have tried to reveal the long trampled footpaths of real borders and regions, not the paved political boundaries that often have little meaning for the lives and fates of human beings.

Letter written to a friend April 26, 1935: While we do not try to minimize the differences between Russia and America, we observed that people in the two countries have many similarities in the way they You say, "Russia is not just a state...she is a super- state, an ocean, elements as yet unformed, not yet spread across the continents, adapted to various environments, conquered or absorbed pulled to its destined shore. [She has] not yet indigenous people, and molded their respective geographies into a set of regions. But begun to sparkle in a sharp and limited understand- ing of her own uniqueness, as the gemstone begins how should that set be defined since the delineation of regions is in part dependent on to glitter within the rough diamond. She is still the criteria selected? in anticipation, restlessness, endless desire, and endless organic possibilities. Russia is an ocean of land which has swept up a whole one-sixth of the We decided to take a particular historic and cultural viewpoint in selecting the eleven earth, holding both East and West together by region-pairs of Beyond Borders. We began with the realization that the majority groups the touch of her open wings. ~ N.K. Rerikh, The Elected, Moscow, Sovetskaya Rossiya publ., in both Russian and American society were offspring of European parents whose seed 1979, p. 303; transl. by K. Braden was transplanted into a North and South hearth in each country. But between these two seedbed regions, something new was born: a Core area which was to become all that one could define as uniquely American or Russian. American democracy was as alien to Europe as Russian autocracy, yet for all their differences, these two Core regions were similar in the creation of two novel cultures on the map. As the new Russian and American societies burst out into the interiors of their respective continents, a series of regions was formed, remarkably similar in their 2 function and characteristics: the Heartlands of industrial muscle, the food-supplying Breadbaskets, the orphaned no-man’s-land Crossroads, the eerie Old Mountains, the Tropical South playgrounds, the arid “Mexistans”, and the vast expanses of Land Ocean that were the American West and Siberia. The waves of conquest and settlement moved east and west respectively and finally met up at the Pacific Edge along a touchstone called Alaska. Could such an exercise be carried out for any two states on earth? Probably not, because The idea of American "exceptionalism" is we believe that the United States and Russia are are unique in their historic and spatial valid if you take it in the sense that America has its own civilization pattern...it does stress parallels. Even the geographic changes in what was the USSR have confirmed some the ways in which America has been favored of the principles the authors foresaw at the beginning of this project. Many of the by geography and historical circumstance. One view of the geographical theory under- republics which made up the USSR never really belonged in Russia as a wider cultural scores the expanse of continent, another realm, but were more like colonies. At the same time, beneath the arbitrarily drawn the expanse of oceans. The continental version points out that America has been boundaries of the republics, there was an underlying but hidden “real” geography blessed with a richness of resources...as few which may yet emerge politically into something more than Russia, perhaps a other nations. The oceanic version points to the stretch of the Atlantic and the Pacific recognition of the term “Rossiya”, loosely translated as “All Russia”. Rossiya includes which enabled America to develop...far from areas (such as North Kazakhstan) which have large Russia populations and where the the wars and dynastic struggles of other nations.~ Max Lerner, America As A Civi- cultures and histories of local people were well intertwined with that of Russia. Our lization, New York, Simon and Schuster, scheme in this book, therefore, goes beyond the current political borders to focus on a 1957, pp. 28-29 larger geography - on Rossiya. At the same time, NAFTA, or the North American Free Trade Agreement, as well as separatist movements in Canada, hint that the North American map itself may not be beyond a redefining of political boundaries in the future. The experiment ofBeyond Borders suggests that the printed lines on paper maps shift and reform constantly to reflect realities of human society. In designing our scheme, the authors found that some geographic entities have no regional analogs. Thus, California is largely excluded from our book. By way of 3 apology, the authors can only state with reverence that there is probably no counterpart to California anywhere on the entire globe. While our book emphasizes similarities between the two countries, we should note that the differences between Russian and American outlooks that surfaced during the book writing were much more serious than mere matters of politics or geographic style. If you asked one of our American authors to discuss a region (“what is the Heartland all about”?), he began by describing now. If you asked one of the Russian team, “what is the South all about?”, he usually started in the 9th century and eventually worked his way up to modern times. For the Russian authors, the joint work of the two geography teams quite validated Henry Ford’s argument that to Americans, the only history worth a damn is that which we make today. In their view it is the relatively young nature of American society that makes the present the only relevant tense. In turn, the American authors began to appreciate how deeply Russian identity is grounded in time, almost as if Russia lives in the past and the future and cares little about the present. This contrast in the perception of history is only one example of how in attempting to create understanding of counterpart regions in America and Russia, we learned much more about ourselves in each country than we had expected. But perhaps we should not have been surprised. After all, our idea in writing Beyond Borders was to open up windows to each other’s countries, but the glass that lets us look through to another place often reflects back as well. One of our Russian authors said it best, “you can’t see yourself, without holding up a mirror.”

4

THE CORE THE CORE Sergei Rogachev Wilbur Zelinsky

The New Year enters every Russian house with the chime of the Moscow The final approach to LaGuardia or JFK airports in New York sometimes takes you Kremlin’s bells. In all time zones of the huge country, watches are set by right over the island of Manhattan. There, just below, are the great skyscrapers, the clocks of Moscow; the schedules of trains and airplanes are put on a tight mass of them huddled around Wall Street toward the southern tip. Now Moscow time. From the Spasskiy Tower, the rotating hands of the Kremlin’s all of the vast, intricate harbor is visible with its scores of ships from all over the clock make a circular sweep of benediction all around Russia. The packed world. Five monumental bridges crammed with cars, buses, trains, and trucks cobbles of Red Square resonate with the historic memory that this place reach out from the city, and even in broad daylight there may be no problem represents, and the bustle of a huge city that surrounds it invades only one picking out the bright glare and promise of Times Square. A long rectangle of corner where the country’s largest department store is located. But in just green appears - Central Park - on two sides girdled by the poshest of hotels and a few paces the noises die down, as if calmed down by imperious gesture apartment buildings. Off to the east, north, and west, as far as you can look, an of the bronze statue of Kuzma Minin (a 17th century organizer of resistance endless maze of homes, shops, factories, warehouses, all overlain by loops of to Polish rule), outstretched over the solemn square. The orgy of colors broad parkways pulsating with their traffic loads. of the famous St. Basil’s dominates the southern side, but fails to create If you could look far enough out your plane window, you would see a an ambiance for the whole place. Instead, another rhythm prevails: one skyline that stretches far up and down the Atlantic coast from Boston to measured by the regular striking of the chimes and by the ceremonial steps Washington D.C. You are gazing at the very center of the North American of the honor guard, still replaced hourly at Lenin’s tomb. Core. And, insofar as any place is entitled to the claim, this is still the spine, This is probably the only spot in all of Russia where everything functions in the command post for much of the western world. perfect clockwork order, constant and unshakable. For a person from the provinces who arrives in Moscow by trains or airplanes that are chronically behind schedule, who is used to chaos in his workplace and who distrusts the authorities, this is the only place where he may sense the regular heartbeat of Russia. It is only here that he may regain his faith in the state. 1 2 Vologda •

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100 0 ._--~---.J..\100 3 - tniles Z 4 - MOSCOW MEGALOPOLIS The Core of Russia is a single great urban area, Moscow, and that city dominates New York may indeed be a formidable city, but it alone does not define the American a hierarchical structure which permeates both the spatial and societal layout of the Core; instead, the region is made up of a line of cities often called Megalopolis, running country. The outline of Moscow on the distant horizon does not gather up into the down the northeastern seabord - a geographic expression of concentrated economic pyramid of skyscrapers driven by the land values of a western city, but rather shows and social power. The reasons for the evolution of a linear nerve center, rather than a a few large buildings that symbolize the singularity of power in the state: the onion single dominating city, may be explained at least in part by the nature of power in this domes of cathedrals directing the eye up to heaven, the towers rising out of the Kremlin country. The skyscrapers commanding the downtowns erupted from the same market walls, and the Stalin-era “wedding cake” skyscrapers - all reminders of political and forces that drove the competition among the cities of Megalopolis. Eventually an spiritual power on the urban landscape. The highest points of Moscow were pushed oligarchy of urban areas emerged; but then, would a singular Core have fit a pluralistic up by decree, and the relationship between this urban brain center and the country society? resonates down the hierarchy. The Line Crystallizes How the Core Prevailed There was little in its physical geography that could have made the dramatic success For all the Core’s apparent centrality today, in the days of Kievan Rus it was strictly of the Core inevitable. The fortuitous character of the Core’s ascendancy becomes peripheral. The Core was not one of the original cradles of the Russian state, but its clear enough when we realize that 500 years ago, prior to the European invasion, this colonized periphery. Most of the ancient cities of the region were founded by settlers was decidedly one of North America’s backwater areas. A moderately dense array of from either northern Novgorodian or southern Kievan mother sources. Native Americans did dwell within the region, but at a level of technology and social organization less advanced than in communities to the southwest and southeast. The two waves of colonists’ movement from the southern and northern cradles of Initially, the region emerged as a succession of urban and agrarian communities along Russia were strongly influenced by an increasingly continental climate to the east. the North Atlantic littoral between New York Harbor and upper Chesapeake Bay. The Thus, the arid environment and threats from steppe nomads made the flow of settlers early Core was claimed and settled by a variety of European powers and their subjects: from the Dnieper veer off to the north, along the Oka River. Meanwhile, the eastward several distinct groups from the British Isles, the Dutch, Flemish, Swedes, and Finns. movement of people from Novgorod was likewise deflected to the south along the The urban points that originated here at first faced Europe: Philadelphia was the largest Volga by harsh winters and bare soils. But the wedge of land bounded by the Volga and city in the original colonies, and served as an export point for food from its hinterland; Oka Rivers seems to be a compromise landscape between northern forest and southern Baltimore began as a harbor city to ship out tobacco; and when New York was founded steppe zones. The North creeps into the Core with moraines, swampy lowlands, and by the Dutch in the 1600’s, its natural port sites seemed ready made for trade with the lakes that seem to be tiny splatters of the huge lakes of the northwest. Novgorodians 5 6 entered the region follo wing this familiar environment. Southern Russia penetrated Old World. Washington D.C., with its function of service the now independent the Core in the form of large fertile clearings, extremely rewarding for agricultural country, was a relative newcomer to the line of cities crystallizing along the east coast. colonization. The northern and southern flows of colonization, both deflected But why did this particular region of the country emerge to become so dominant? by unfriendly environments, thus met and coalesced in the Core. Ultimately, the Although there was a considerable range of geographic conditions and physical two major cultural strands of Russia (transplanted Byzantine and Baltic European resources, none of the latter were so exceptional as to foster regional supremacy. We can influences) blended here into a uniquely “native” Russian style that came to define the invoke climate as one of the factors in the inability of the Core to push south past the face of the country. It was in the Core that northern and southern Slavs blended into Potomac River. In lower latitudes, weather and soil combine to create problems for the Greater Russians. traditional Northwest European modes of farming and animal husbandry. Similarly, In the homogeneous environment of the huge Russian plain the ascendancy of a single any substantial northward extension in New York has been pretty well precluded by center may have been inevitable, but Moscow had no special advantage that would the shortness of the growing season and particularly by the stoniness of the soil where determine its rise to power. The history of Moscow as a self-made domineering focus glaciers once lay. of Russia is reflected in the very asymmetrical shape of the Core. The region extends far In terms of prospects for expansion, the American Core has suffered from one major to the East while being severely circumscribed in the South, North, and especially the drawback: the formidable Appalachian barrier. On the other hand, the accidents of West, the front where it had to fight for its very survival. The asymmetry is especially geological history have furnished the Core with three crucial and easy entry ways from striking in the west, which took the brunt of frequent invasions from Europe, and ocean to interior: the Hudson River, open to oceangoing vessels as far north as Albany, where the Core’s expansion was long arrested. As a result, the western boundary of the and providing fine natural harbors near its mouth in the New York City area and Core is a mere 40 miles from Moscow, perhaps contributing to Russian xenophobia northern New Jersey; the Delaware River and its estuary; and Chesapeake Bay, with its about the West. While Moscow frequently proclaimed itself to be the heir to the best extension into Pennsylvania via the Susquehanna. New York’s Mohawk Valley and the achievement of humanity with titles such as the Third Rome or First Socialist State, it various glacial spillways in Ohio and Indiana made canal building a relatively simple was still frustrated to discover equal or surpassing achievement on its western frontiers. proposition. But the development of harbors, canals, and even the watery highway of The feeling of Russian superiority to the West (especially in terms of “spirituality”) is the Great Lakes awaited the political and technological events that came to pass later in but the reverse side of an inferiority complex about western material achievement. the Core. Finally, the region emjoyed a physical advantage shared with New England The region’s southern boundary is marked by a line of cities along the Oka that once of relative proximity to Europe in terms of both shipping time and costs. In any formed a protective belt from the nomads. When the early Russian state of Muscovy competition with the Core, the coastal zone to the south was at a distinct disadvantage made its first tentative moves beyond the Oka and into the steppe, the city of Tula because of the near absence of decent natural harbors and the greater distances to became its first outpost, and famous Tula armories (still a major industry) supplied European ports. Russia’s southward expansion. Clashes with Islam along the southern interface of the 7 8 region sustained Russia’s messianic feeling; Muscovites saw the simultaneous decline But it was the opening up of America that finally pushed the region into the forefront. of Constantinople and the ascent of Moscow as a sign of its predestination to become As the American Midwest began to realize its agricultural productivity, the need for a the Third Rome. Here in the south were forged such elements of national character good passage route into the interior emerged as paramount. Rapid land development as the belief that Russia can be a savior and a teacher to other peoples and perform along the coast and rising populations generated pressure for settlement of new lands to [New York City] is a great organism of Moscow is a gigantic chronicle oc- some global mission. This youthful arrogance of a child that outstripped its parents has the west, but first the north-south ranging Appalachian Mountains had to be breached. specialized skill and leadership in finance, cupied by the entire history of the frequently led Moscow to reject the valuable heritage of its two older “mother cradles”: The east coast cities of the Core naturally entered into competition for the control industry and commerce which reaches Russian people. ~ Leonid Leonov, the Novgorodian tradition of popular self rule or the scholarly conventions of Kiev, and of trade routes into the interior. New York already had the advantage of controlling every spot in our country...Every activity Our Moscow, 1972, p. 72 of this city is sensitive to every evil and St. Petersburg’s westernism has likewise been irritating. access to the easiest passage in the northern half of the nation, the route along the flat every favorable tide that sweeps this expanse of land due south of Lake Ontario. But it did not emerge as the clear winner Threatened from the west and from the south, Moscow sought escape, guidance, and great nation of ours. until the Erie Canal opened in 1825, creating a waterway from the Great Lakes all the new identity in the only natural direction left: the east, where Moscow always retreated way to New York City. Two decades later, rail connections followed to the burgeoning ~ Herbert Hoover speech to New at crucial moments of its history. In the turmoil of the Time of Troubles (1609-1613), Chicago, and New York became the largest city in the United States as early as the mid York City October 22, 1928, Madison when Moscow was overrun by the Poles, the northeastern forests near Kostroma Square Garden 19th century. served as a hiding place for the Romanov family who became the new Russian dynasty. The most venerated saint of Russia, Sergei of Radonezh, was born in a small town American to the Core northeast of Moscow and established there the famous Trinity monastery, a holy place of pilgrimage which remains the buttress of Russian Orthodoxy. From this monastery What makes the American Core unique is the fact that from the initial years of came the blessings and encouragement for two decisive battles against the Mongols. European settlement up to the present moment, it has been the arena for meeting, Finally, it was Moscow’s eastward expansion into the Volga Basin that turned the Core mingling, and fertile hybridization of contrasting peoples and cultures, and at the same into the master of a huge country. In the east, Muscovite culture became “the” Russian time has formed a political setting that encouraged creative use of wealth and power. culture. While both the Northern and Southern hearths of settlement were easily recognizable as transplants of European society, in the Core something quite new and distinctively Russian to the Core American emerged. It was in this region, particularly Pennsylvania, that smaller family farms prevailed over larger landholdings. As if in conscious symbolism, Moscow is located in the center of the triangle formed by the three Novgorods: Novgorod the Great, Russia’s ancient foothold in the North and In terms of its social life, the region brought together peoples from such a large sweep its old window on western Europe; Novgorod Severskiy, the outpost of ancient Kievan that a spirit of tolerance and liberalism developed, helped in part by the Quaker Rus closest to Moscow and the starting point of ancient colonization movement from heritage of the midlands. One of the oldest free Black communities in the United States the Kievan core; and Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia’s easternmost outpost from the 13th to was founded in Philadelphia, and so many people from abroad were pouring in 9 10 16th centuries, which served as a gateway to the Volga cradle of Islamic world and later through the Core by 1789 that a new word appeared to describe arrivals more precisely: became the hinge connecting the fate of central Russia to that of Asia. the two-way English word “emigrant” became the Americanized term, “immigrant.” As historian Henry Adams noted about Pennsylvania’s role in American cultural Moscow’s original rise to power was due to the external support of Mongol rulers on history: “When one summed up the results of Pennsylvania influences, one inclined to the Volga who used Muscovite princes as their henchmen in the control of Russian think that Pennsylvania set up the government in 1789, saved it in 1861; created the principalities. Moscow learned well the Mongol lesson in politics and built its strength American system; developed its iron and coal power; and invented its great railways. through an Oriental mode of totalitarian rule. Many historians argue that the early The Pennsylvania mind was not complex; it reasoned little and never talked; but in roots of Russian autocracy, so different from European feudalism, are to be found in the practical matters, it was the steadiest of all American types; perhaps the most efficient; Core’s early history as a frontier periphery, where the princes directed the colonization certainly the safest.” process and enjoyed powers that they did not have in the North or South. Later, the needs of eastward expansion into the Volga basin furthered the militarization of the In its economic life, the Core represented the competition that was to become so state and the introduction of universal serfdom. Leaning on the East, the great prince characteristic of a capitalist system. In the cities of the region, the the profit motive has of Moscow became the Tsar (“Caesar”), with absolute unbounded autocratic power always been a prime consideration, whether by way of commerce, shipment of goods, that eventually mutated into the powers of the General Secretary of the Communist manufacturing, services, banking, information management, or even speculation. Party. Many key developments of Russian history occurred along the eastern vector Other rationales for existence were secondary: only occasionally were the early towns of the Core. In the 19th century, the zone east of Moscow nurtured indigenous fortified for some military mission, and the development of social and cultural Russian capitalism (as opposed to the state-created capitalism of St. Petersburg). The traditions was even something of an afterthought. Furthermore, in keeping with the northeastern flank of the Core became the land of textiles and the most industrialized competitive ethos of capitalism, the leading port cities of the Core have engaged in the part of Russia, due to the energy and quiet solidity of the Old Believers (who once hid fiercest sort of rivalry among themselves (and with such external competitors as New in the forests of the northeast) which made them the famous early industrialists of Orleans, Norfolk, Boston, and Montreal) in the struggle to capture the traffic of the Moscow. To our day, the Core remains Russia’s largest industrial region, accounting rich continental heartland. for a fifth of industrial output. It is also the most urbanized one, as many industrial By the nineteenth century, the Core was even dominating the speech and literary villages of the past, such as Ivanovo, have developed into large cities. It was in such patterns of what was to be identified as American. A North Midland speech dialect industrial cities that not only Russian capitalism but also a very Russian egalitarian (which is considered “standard American English”) developed along the coast and response to it were born. In 1905, Ivanovo became the birthplace of the first “soviet” moved inland throught the Heartland and on to the American West. One of the first (literally “council”) of workers, a uniquely proletarian concept that gave its name to the writers to emerge and become identified with a uniquely American literature was a Soviet Union. Thus the Core has effectively shaped Russian political forms from the child of the Core: Walt Whitman was born on Long Island, raised in Brooklyn, and 12th century to the present. 11 12 From the 13th century to 1941, Russia answered the vital question “to be or not to died in 1892 in Camden, New Jersey. His Leaves of Grass, published in the 1850s, be?” in historic battles fought along the perimeter of the Core. While pushing out marks the beginning of America’s departure from a European literary tradition and the boundaries of early Muscovy centrifugally to the limits of the world’s largest state, represents the brash pride that was beginning to define the nation: the region in turn developed a powerful centripetal tendency, gathering power inward to Moscow. Throughout most of Russian history, the awesome machinery of state We must march my darling, we must bear the brunt of danger, managed to control even the most remote corners of the country and to extract from We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, them a sort of “tribute”, both in the form of centrally redistributed fiscal and material Pioneers! O Pioneers! resources, and by requisitioning the nation’s best brains and strong personalities. The region that “made” the country developed a kind of sacral aura as the epitome of the One would expect to find the capital of a nation located within the historically true and Holy Russia. Even after the imperial capital was moved to St. Petersburg in dominant region of any sensible country, but the path to that choice of site was 1712, the Core preserved its key role, as exemplified by Napoleon’s invasion in 1812 not smooth for the United States. When the Constitutional Convention met in that aimed at the heart of Russia, Moscow. During the Middle Ages, visitors from Philadelphia in 1787, the logical selection for the young republic’s capital city would Europe who clearly saw the unique role of the city called the state itself not after its have been Philadelphia itself or New York City, either of which could then have people (“Russia”) but after its node (“Muscovy”). The notorious centralism of the claimed supremacy in population or wealth. But, as it happened, severe sectional rivalry USSR was not the rule of Russia, but the rule of Moscow’s bureaucracy and its satraps between North and South scuttled any such possibility. Though commercial power over both Russian and non-Russian provinces. In the Soviet Union, a traditional favored the North, Virginia was still the country’s most populous state, and perhaps differentiation was made between people of Moscow (Muscovites) and people outside its most powerful in terms of social and intellectual impact. The District of Columbia, of Moscow (provincials). Even in post-Soviet Russia, Moscow has retained and even that unprepossessing swampy rural site along the Potomac, became the compromise strengthened its sense of separateness and superiority from the rest of the country. solution. The precarious borderland position of Washington became all too obvious during the Civil War when it barely escaped serious military assault, and only slowly did the city become the large, imposing place it is today. After the outcome of the Civil War determined that the Core plus New England, not the South, would administer the economic and political business of the nation, it was then too late shift the capital; however, the decision to situate the United Nations’ headquarters in Manhattan is a recognition of the hard geographic realities of our contemporary world. As a result, New York today represents the power elite of the United States, the embodiment of “big government” and a place which is at once exciting and dangerous. 13 14 THEME 1: LIFE IN THE URBAN ISLAND THEME 1: LIFE IN THE URBAN ARCHIPELAGO Being the almost monopolistic dispenser of power, the capital city was in many ways a During the past few decades, the Core has spilled its urban character even further privileged one, enjoying a disproportionate share of budgetary outlays. The State took outward as modern transport and greater affluence have enabled millions of persons to good care of Moscow’s armies of office workers and intellectuals who legitimized and escape not just into suburbs but also even further into what is termed Exurbia. There, strengthened the regime. Moscow’s privileged population enjoyed better housing, an in scattered clustered developments, highway strips, or isolated dwellings, a population excellent subway system and access to comparatively well stocked shelves in groceries which is rural but not farmers by profession lives amidst bucolic surroundings, yet still or imported consumer goods in department stores. In Moscow, buses ran on schedule, enjoys many of the amenities of urban existence. business could be done without bribes, and families were fed without resort to the black market. After all, Moscow was also a showpiece for the outside world and the The majority of people in the Core, however, are urban and suburban dwellers, living country’s own residents, and the city was officially designated as a “model communist in an amazing mixture of races, ethnicities, and incomes. Few places can think of city.” Sharp witted Russians said the same in different words, quipping that “Socialism challenging New York City when it comes to sheer number and diversity of ethnic ends at the line of Moscow’s Beltway.” groups. Here is a dazzling mosaic of peoples, languages, and cultural traditions, to rival the Tower of Babel. Even in its earliest years under Dutch rule, the city welcomed The many advantages of life in Moscow made it an obvious magnet for migrants. Early a mixture of newcomers quite unusual for the period. As time went on, New York on, Moscow based planners realized that to remain a privileged island, the city needed became by far the nation’s leading port of entry, and a large fraction of those arriving to close its doors to diluting hosts of newcomers. The task was performed by the unique traveled no farther than America’s largest city with its exceptional range of economic Soviet system of propiska, or residence permit system. Without a local propiska, one possibilities. The result has been a place the majority of whose residents are first- or cannot get a job or an apartment. Moscow initiated the practice of “closing” the city by second-generation foreign stock. At the present time, the leading “minorities.” if that is denying propiskas to newcomers. Since under the Soviet system the quality-of-life index an accurate term, are African-Americans and Hispanics, but neither category is uniform for any city was directly related to its administrative status, the practice of “closing” in composition. Although the former consists mostly of migrants from the American cities quickly spread to the 14 mini Moscows of the former Union republic capitals, South and their progeny, Africans, Jamaicans, Haitians, and other West Indians are also and then to even smaller administrative centers. The sense of a perfect pyramidal well represented, while Cubans, Salvadorans, Dominicans, Brazilians, and other Latin hierarchy permeated the Soviet settlement structure, and upward social mobility Americans, as well as the numerically dominant Puerto Ricans, are easy enough to find became synonymous with moving to ever larger cities, until the final coveted apex, within the Hispanic fold. Moscow. A passage through the propiska barriers was possible through elaborate chains of apartment exchanges or by marriage. Marrying a registered resident of Moscow made Like some other American cities, New York has witnessed ethnic succession over space an out of towner a resident too, and cases of marriages of convenience abound. But a and time as great numbers of Irish and Germans were followed by Chinese, Italians, shortcut into the socialist haven lay through blue collar industrial Jews, and various East European groups, then more recently by not only Latin 15 16 employment: the chronically understaffed industrial enterprises had the right to recruit Americans, but also Middle Easterners, East Indians, Thai, Filipinos, Vietnamese, labor elsewhere. After a passage of several years these recruits above the limit, limitchiki, Chinese from a variety of countries, Ethiopians, and still another influx of Russian became registered Muscovites. Paradoxically, propiska limitations only accelerated the Jews. Frequently, as the group that had dominated a relatively homogeneous growth of Moscow. The difficulties of getting into the city gave Muscovites a caste like neighborhood moved up the socioeconomic ladder and outward to suburbia, a different superiority complex and aristocratic disdain of blue collar work, forcing the enterprises set of immigrants would replace them, and later repeat the process - but not always. If to annually import thousands of limitchiki to man the jobs that Muscovites avoided. neighborhoods that were once heavily Jewish, German, Italian, Hungarian, Czech, or whatever have turned into something else, the large, ever-expanding African-American If the higher material standard of living was the major attraction for limitchik types, districts show no signs of yielding to invaders; and Chinatown is becoming more the city was also a magnet for intellectual aspirants. Over the years Moscow sucked in Chinese than ever and bulging outward ever since the liberalization of immigration informational wealth by concentrating libraries, archives, and museum collections from laws in 1965. all over the country and creating an environment where research and culture thrive. In the late 1980’s, Moscow concentrated more than one quarter of the Ph.D.s in the This wild ethnicity is visible - and audible, smellable, and tastable - in restaurants, USSR and was by far the country’s largest center of higher learning. More importantly, groceries, and other sidewalk food vendors catering to their own kin or offering exotic against the low standards in most provincial schools, a Moscow diploma or degree is specialties to the adventurous gentile. The diversity shows up as well in the churches, taken as a sign of quality. The city further enriched its cultural compost by practically synagogues, temples, and mosques with their ethnically exclusive flocks, and in the monopolizing contacts with the outside world. Until recently, Moscow’s Sheremetyevo social clubs, fraternal groups, and special schools, the multifarious foreign-language Airport was the only entrypoint for international flights, and no other place in the press and radio and television programs, the festivals, parades, and music pouring out country saw so many foreign visitors. No other city in the USSR was so exposed to of windows into the streets. “contaminating” influences of the West and so ready to imbibe them. Moscow’s elite culture is strikingly cosmopolitan and liberal. The urban archipelago of the Core does suffer chronically from dilemmas peculiar to the area or relatively extreme versions of general American conditions. The most However, the cosmopolitanism hardly shows in the ethnic structure of Moscow’s intense and pervasive problem may be the striking social and economic disparities seen population. In 1989, ninty percent of the population called themselves Russian, and within small areas, sometimes even a single city block. Such jarring discontinuities, ninty-nine percent gave Russian as their mother tongue. Even the largest minorities, the coexistence side by side of ostentatious wealth and privilege on the one hand and Jews, Ukrainians and Tatars, are almost completely Russified in cultural terms. destitution and physical decay on the other are not unknown elsewhere in the United Yet one should not hurry to conclude that Moscow is a purely Russian city. As an States, but they are probably nowhere more visibly intrusive and unavoidable than in “island of socialism” Moscow long functioned as safe haven for those who aspired to the Core. good education and careers but were barred from them in the USSR’s non Russian peripheries where too much depends on traditionalistic clan networks, bribes, or 17 18 belonging to the ruling ethnic group. By contrast, the capital was always the most From the very beginning of European colonization, the cities of the Core embodied the tolerant part of the USSR, rapidly recasting peripheral “refugees” from nationalism principles of capitalism as purely and singlemindedly as any other group of places in the or poverty not so much into Russians as into generic “Soviets.” The non Slavic modern world. The burgeoning, nondescript, unplanned, and uncontrolled suburban physiognomies and names of many officially “Russian” Muscovites present a picture of belts encircling Core metropolises are models of similar excrescences in other regions. the population far more diverse than official statistics would have us believe. The same is true for the “Edge Cities,” those effectively autonomous agglomerations of retail, office, entertainment, residential, and other facilities that have mushroomed The place where one can best see Moscow’s mixture of peoples is in its stores and at strategic points along the peripheries of New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. streets. Department stores swarm with visitors from the provinces, hunting for fancy In general, the central sections of virtually every American city founded in the 19th gifts. In post-Soviet times, western firms such as Estee Lauder and McDonald’s opened century or earlier have experienced serious economic decline and neglect, despite the outlets first in Moscow. People from the Caucasus and Central Asia swept the stores for rehabilitation of selected neighborhoods. A decline in manufacturing employment merchandise that was available in their home areas only from under the counter and and the change to a “postindustrial” economy have exacerbated the gulf between the previously not at a fixed state price. The city’s prohibitively expensive farmer’s markets well-off and the poor in the Core cities. But in no other region of the country has this were primarily occupied by Ukrainians or distinctively Mediterranean Azeris. Yet the downward spiral progressed further than in some Core metropolises such as Newark. area where non Russian presence is most tangible is the criminal world dominated by In fact, New York City, Philadelphia and other Core cities have recently veered ethnic mafias, from the Vietnamese one to the especially notorious Chechens from dangerously close to bankruptcy and more such episodes are bound to occur in the the northern Caucasus. Moscow now houses nightclubs where the young, newly rich years ahead. class of post-Soviet Russia may meet for one-hundred dollar a glass champagnes. Mafia control of much of speculative trading activity in the capital is breeding strong The vast accumulation of inhabitants and the presence of so many enterprises resentment against all dark skinned southerners collectively dubbed as Caucasians. consuming great quantities of water have led to increasing difficulties in insuring adequate supplies, especially in the eastern portions of the Core, even though it is In such manifestations of racism, the nation’s ultimate city that so disdains its provinces a relatively well watered part of the world. In the case of a thirsty NYC, some of its as “rural backwaters” itself demonstrates some parochial ruralism. With a large share of principal water sources lie many miles away. When drought occurs, as has happened its residents, especially the limitchiki, coming directly from the countryside, Moscow more than once in recent decades, the situation has been worrisome, raising the may have been the least urbane of urban giants and was sometimes called the prospect of outright disaster. “big village.” Still, Muscovites largely belonged to the Soviet breed of middle class: outwardly loyal to the regime but also well educated and therefore deeply cynical. Declining quality of the natural environment is matched by deterioration in the social Ironically, the Core of Russia is a city that is at once both sophisticated and provincial. structures necessary for the proper functioning of a great metropolis: public schools, transportation lines, government facilities and services. But it may be premature to write the obituary for New York and other cities of the Core: there is every likelihood 19 20 No other city of the Core can even remotely compare to Moscow in size or importance. that the region will continue to enact its well-established role as a leading member The doughnut area that remains if one removes Moscow from the Core region is in the ensemble of American regions, even if not necessarily with the same degree of known as Podmoskovye (literally, “Around and Under Moscow”), an unprecedented absolute dominance as in the past. placename, the likes of which was never coined for St Petersburg, Kiev, or any other metropolis of Russia. In retrospect it appears that the Core’s historic mission was in THEME 2: POWER OF THE CORE shielding, nourishing, and raising Moscow, the giant, which in a sense overshadowed The Core includes more territory than just Megalopolis, but Megalopolis in turn so the region that nurtured it. Today, the Core is still synonymous with Moscow. The busy dominates the region as to drain out an established identity for other places in the activity of its outlying towns is largely part of the capital’s metabolism. It is a dominant region. The small area of New Jersey that lies outside the built-up urban area, central city indeed, more than twice the size of St. Petersburg or Kiev and ten times that of the Pennsylvania, and the cities of upstate New York are all living in the shadow of Core’s second largest city, Nizhniy Novgorod. Appropriately enough, in Soviet political Megalopolis, dependent on it and yet resentful of its power and role in the spotlight. parlance Moscow was called simply “The Center,” and it has once again emerged in post-Soviet Russia as a focus of power and prestige for the nouveaux riches. The concentration of people, power, and wealth in the Core has been phenomenal, but what proportion of the American population is in the region? From Connecticut THEME 2: POWER OF THE CORE to Washington D.C, 47 million people, or nineteen percent of the United States, are packed into the region, most living in urban concentrations along the coast. For the The Center perpetuates its power over the country by firmly controlling its better part of 200 years, it was residents of this region, along with those in a strongly communications. In the past, the roads did not so much converge on Moscow as spread influential neighboring southern New England, who so largely molded the economic, out from it, sent out almost as tentacles to bind the nation with a single will. Moscow’s political, social, and cultural destinies of the entire country. transport supremacy is somewhat artificial but completely unchallenged. All roads begin in Moscow in a strictly radial pattern. Frequently the only way to get from one The case for the Core’s supremacy is strong, for example, in the field of part of the country to another is via Moscow, and every day, the capital sees hundreds communications. New York City has a near monopoly of book publishing; the bulk of thousands of transit passengers. As a transportation node, Moscow is a transit point of important American magazines are edited there or in Philadelphia and other Core for one half of the cargo traffic of the former USSR, and one fifth of its passenger metropolises; and the Government Printing Office in Washington is by all odds the traffic. At the other end of the scale, the strictly hierarchical nature of Soviet society was world’s single greatest generator of printed matter. The United States may not have imprinted in the pattern of the streets of Moscow itself. a full-fledged national newspaper, but The New York Times and Washington Post are plausible facsimiles, while the contents of the nationally distributed USA Today All major streets and the lines of Moscow’s extensive subway system converge in the emanate from a Manhattan address. Commercial radio and television stations and center although only one major ring line is close to the Kremlin itself. While getting networks originated in the Core (as did electric telegraphy and telephones much from the outlying areas of the city to downtown center is fast and convenient, 21 22 tangential movements are difficult. Downtown (logically called “the center” in Russian) earlier), and despite severe competition from Los Angeles, corporate control and much dominates daily lives of all Muscovites, not least because it is as privileged in terms programming remain in New York City. The early film industry came into being in the of provision of goods and services compared to Moscow as a whole, as Moscow is metropolis, but subsequently became the only major mode of communication to escape compared to the country. Being close to the center is a great advantage, and the value concentration in the Core. of housing steadily declines as one moves away from the center. This pattern of housing Thanks to an early start and a convergence of favorable historical and economic markets (typical not only for Moscow) was quite the opposite of the western one, circumstances, not too many decades ago, the Core claimed a highly disproportionate mirroring the chain of command structure of center dominated Soviet society and share of America’s manufacturing enterprises and industrial output, and was engaged economy. in every imaginable type of production. The major cities of the Core also rank In a predominantly non-private and non-market economy, Moscow was a general prominently within the retailing and wholesaling sectors of the American economy. headquarters, the home of ministries that controlled all the branches of the economy. Moreover, few places in the world can rival New York City in the range and variety of Their central location itself was hardly surprising unless one considers the peculiarity specialized commodities for sale in their shops and showrooms. of dozens of Soviet “industrial ministries” that were for all practical purposes corporate Impressive though the accumulation of transportation, communication, industrial, headquarters of huge monopolies, and regulated even minute aspects of operations. It and commercial resources in the Core may be, the most convincing measures of its was in Moscow, almost 400 miles from the nearest seas, that bureaucrats decided how preeminence appear in the higher reaches of the economy and of human endeavor. best to fish in the open oceans. Six hundred miles from the nearest vineyard, guidelines Wherever in the United States or overseas products or services may be physically were laid for preparing wines. produced, it is in the Core, notably New York City, that control is exercised, that Moscow focused the thoughts and hopes of the people in all of the former USSR: in governing decisions are formulated. There has been little erosion in the long term, the offices of Moscow’s ministries, many a career was decided, and there is hardly a top heavy concentration of capital, of banking and other financial services, stock town in the country that does not have some graduates from Moscow’s institutes of market transactions, major law firms, and the ruling advertising agencies in a handful higher learning. With the population mainly consisting of migrants, the city is linked of districts within a handful of Core cities. Within those same neighborhoods, in a to the rest of the country by networks of family ties, friendships, or personal loyalties. symbiotic relationship, are the offices of most of the major private foundations that In all of the country, a person aspiring to a promising career had much better chances dispense support for so much philanthropic, educational, scientific, and artistic activity if he or she had some connections in Moscow. In the entertainment industry, acquiring throughout America and much of the rest of the world. national fame was only possible by performing on the scenes of Moscow’s theaters, by While the office towers of New York City symbolize economic power, political control publishing in its publishing houses, or by exhibiting one’s work in its art galleries. emanates from the purposefully low-profile government buildings in the nation’s capital. Perhaps Washington’s situation is the most extraordinary among all the world’s 23 24 The provinces reinforce a deeply embedded image of Moscow as a fairytale dispenser cities in terms of the sheer accumulation of lobbyists, think tanks, influence peddlers, of both benefits and punishments. Regional bureaucracies outside Moscow have always and other would be manipulators of law, not to mention a world class array of tried to maintain their own lobbyists in the city. The very word “Moscow” contained a diplomatic missions and international agencies. certain magic for a provincial, and in local administrative centers, the words “I am from Parallel with this astonishing assemblage of economic and, in the broad sense, political Moscow” would frequently open the doors of a bureaucrats office closed to the locals. resources at so few points within the American Core, there is also an equally intense Muscovites visiting remote corners of the country frequently find themselves in an stockpiling of cultural resources and activities in the same privileged region. Many awkward position, as they perceive locals’ ambiguous attitude toward the Core. Bitterly of the oldest, most prestigious, and most influential of colleges and universities complaining about the problems in their own backyards, the provincials view “the (public and private), such as Princeton, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins, are situated Center” as universal villain, but whose guilt, paradoxically, is neglect of local affairs. in the Core. Many hundreds of notable museums of every description are established The laments are underpinned with the hopes for some redress from the Center. in the region, and the Core also claims an unduly generous share of the nation’s Moscow’s super centralization would frequently force people to come to the city to libraries, including literally thousands of specialized ones in addition to such immense solve petty problems that could in principle be dealt with locally. From early on, the collections as those in the New York Public Library or Library of Congress. A good belief in the “good tsar” sitting in Moscow had been implanted in the Russian psyche, many leading laboratories and Research and Development centers are also here, as the capital symbolized not only power but also justice. The populace firmly believed whether in association with universities or private corporations. When it comes to that local authorities did not want to address people’s problems, while the good tsars nearly all the more sophisticated forms of culture and entertainment, no city can of Moscow could do so. Thus, Moscow became the last resort of appeals against power think of challenging New York City’s supremacy. It is there, on Broadway and off, that abuses back home. American theater is most concentrated, venturesome, and alive (if also perpetually dying). The city is also the great arbiter and marketplace, the place of ultimate Moscow’s rulers were always concerned with the common good of the country and pilgrimage and performance, for practitioners and artists in the world of opera, dance, therefore quite sincerely (and not so wrongly) believed that they knew what a particular symphony, and all other categories of art. region should do better than the self serving bureaucracies of the region itself. The caring and protecting parental hand of the center was sometimes very heavy, and yet it would be wrong to say that Moscow merely profited at the expense of its children. Preoccupied with its socialist egalitarian concerns, the “Communist City” redistributed national product through all embracing centralized budget so as to preclude the emergence within the country of unfairly privileged “oil emirates” or deprived, depressed areas. If the Core’s success in this self appointed mission was indecisive it was because of the failure of the grand socialist project itself. 25 26 The Pulse of Change: Moscow and the Devolution of the USSR Moving Ahead: New York City and the Growth of the Sunbelt “As is known, all the land begins from the Kremlin.” Will Megalopolis continue its dominance of American life and the country’s economy? - Mayakovskiy The ever-changing geography of the United States may be witnessing a shift of the core, either to the southern California, or to a dispersed Sunbelt along the southern and In a country which has fallen apart, these words may appear out of place, but they western tier. contain an important grain of historic truth and neatly summarize the basics of the region. Any weakening of the universal control center, like the one brought by Various pieces of evidence support this notion: population change, which indicates perestroika, set the provinces drifting apart. Having first lost the satellites in Europe, a movement of the American population center south and westward as the Sunbelt Moscow then let go the former union republics, and now even Russia itself is cracking grows and the so-called “Rustbelt” regions decline; political shifts as districts outside at the seams. The demise of the USSR hit Muscovites hard by divesting them of their of the traditional Core gain political representation at the expense of northeast states; privileged status, but it barely diminished the powers and vitality of the Core. To our and economic change as the United States loses manufacturing jobs and moves into a day, Moscow remains an indisputable economic frontrunner as the Core has emerged as post-industrial employment base of service and white-collar occupations. Even popular a leader in market reforms and a “free” economy. culture in the U.S. seems more defined by Southern California styles, speech, and preferences these days than by those of Megalopolis. Beyond Russian boundaries things Soviet are by no means dead. Moscow can feel (with a certain vengeance) that it merely replicated itself in the capitals of the 14 newly But the Core cities are not going down without a fight. Revitalization of inner city independent republics who fully emulate the old Soviet patterns of centralized control waterfronts, downtowns, and neighborhoods is beginning with such projects as within their respective domains. Their politics give ample proof that they imbibed Baltimore’s Harborplace, New York’s South Street Seaport, and Philadelphia’s Society far more of the common all Soviet culture and attitudes than the nationalistic parties Hill. High-tech employment, often associated with universities or government would admit. However, none of the new states shows economic viability without functions, have grown in many areas of the Core, notably along the beltway around massive subsidies from Russia, directed as ever, by Moscow. The regions that hastily Washington D.C. But despite the vitality and life that throbs in Megalopolis, economic scurried away from “The Center” are finding themselves drawn back by strings that hard times are creating ever deeper divisions between rich and poor in the region, and are stronger than alleged “Muscovite imperialism.” No less importantly, the lives of the middle class seems to be moving on down the highway. In a period of change and people in the former USSR still depend on Moscow, and with the euphoria of local in a society which always looks ahead, the Core may be in for a tough fight. sovereignties wearing off, the Core, stripped of its old coercive powers, may again find itself presiding over some reborn Union.

27 28

THE NORTH THE NORTH Aleksei Naumov Thomas Baerwald

In late May, the rivers and lakes near Cherepovets are thawing, and the air is filled In the New England autumn, the old graveyard in Massachusetts seems sad with the lapping sounds of cold waves, the screams of seagulls, and the whistles and bleak. The oldest of the markers are tumbled down on the eastern hillside, of passing ships. Navigation and life are at long last returning to the Russian the flagstone cracked with names barely readable in old script. When you walk North. The first thing that strikes the imagination of a tourist peeking from the among the graves, the red maple leaves at your feet rustle in the cold twilight. window of a cruiseship cabin is the solid wall of trees blocking the horizon. Yet From the hill, you can look out over North Weymouth to the sea. Earlier, it was a along the rivers are still seen quite a few sturdy, two-story log houses or glimpse colonial settlement, but then evolved into a blue- collar suburb of Boston. The the gracious silhouette of a wooden church from the 17th century. Here and cemetery itself tells the history: Pilgrim family names now share the earth with there are the formidable stone walls and cupolas of a monastery - outposts of Irish and Italian souls, and the simple slate graves of many a Congregationalist lie orthodoxy and the Russian spirit. Are these images purely idyllic? No, for beyond horizontal and flat beside elaborate and vertical Catholic angels. In the distance, the stately pines lie thickets of pulp mills and the belching blast furnaces of the where the Fore River runs into Boston Harbor, the old shipyard and industrial city. Even a closer look at the forests themselves reveals they are far from virgin: plants still stand; but many are empty now. The newer area of town has more logging has exploited their treasures and left only thinned-out stands. Navigation prosperous neighborhoods built with Route 128 high-tech salaries. Perhaps lasts a mere three to four months; and in September, when for Muscovites Indian the future lies with the younger families who have moved into the town, drawn Summer is at its height, the ships have already pulled in for the winter. In a few by the quaintness of the Cape Cod houses - people with college degrees and weeks, waterways will be frozen again and falling snow will hide the northern employment in Boston. Yet tonight there is something in the autumn beauty flank of Russia in a white blanket, frozen stiff and seemingly dead until the next which draws out a kind of warning: winter will be here soon, and it will be long fleeting summer. and harsh. Meanwhile it is quiet on this lonely hillside. You can almost hear the ghosts of Pilgrims and sea captains, millwrights and farmers, all coming together on the north wind of October. ~ K. Braden

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Atlant · I C 0 c e a n 3 I. 4 - THE NATURE OF THE NORTH THE NATURE OF THE NORTH For many Russians the image of the North is that of the harsh periphery of Russia, How do Americans define the North? New England has a well-established identity, but associated with the well-known lines from Lermontov’s poem: does the North end at the borders of Vermont? We delineate “North” here as a region split in two pieces, including not only New England, but also “The Northwoods”: In the North, wilderness stands in solitude, the Upper Great Lakes portions of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. Despite On the bare peaks is pine. the spatial separation, these two chunks of North have much in common to justify And in slumber lurching, and with snow their union as a single region; for example, they are often viewed as realms far colder Covering her in a mantle. than most of the rest of the nation. While eastern New England does enjoy a climate All of the North is heavily forested and sparsely populated, and the severity of climate more modified by the Atlantic, the area still experiences with its Northwoods cousin in its eastern part is quite siberian. In contrast, the weather of the more western parts sub-freezing temperatures which occur during six or more months each year, and is moderated by proximity to the Baltic sea and the Atlantic, making the North one of forest covered tracts exceed areas where people actively control the use of the land. In the two early cradles of Russia and its major interface with the western world. Yet even addition, the two sections of “North” are united by a cultural heritage which jumped in this more Maritime area, the harsh north climate influenced important departures over the barriers of both the Great Lakes and an intervening stetch of southern Canada. from what came to be all-Russian patterns, and the standard Russian label for it is But this northern culture originated even further eastward, stretching back across “Northwest” - a region of northern nature but western parentage. the Atlantic, and the environment of New England helped it become one of the two original culture hearths in the United States. The Northwest - Russia’s Window to Europe New England - Europe’s Child Prodigy During the ninth century, two cultural flows met on the Russian Plain: the northern flow, originating from the young Scandinavian and Baltic countries (made up of On September 16, 1620, the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth, England, and German merchants and Viking raiders); and the southern flow of religious influence ultimately created a namesake town along the unforgiving coast of the northlands. from the Byzantine Empire. Both flows traveled along the rivers from the Neva to Settlements in what are now Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut the Dnieper, forming the two apexes of the ancient waterway from the Baltic to followed, extending the Anglo frontier from the Massachusetts cradle and forming Constantinople. The Varangian (Viking) culture of the north was quite different from a Confederation of New England, largely based on Puritan culture. The name New the Greek at the other end, yet the trade route crackled like an electric current between England is indeed telling: having failed to dominate Old England, the Puritan leaders the opposites, and the two early cradles of the future Russian state were born: the crossed the ocean in hopes of creating their ideal community on virgin American soil. southern one in Kiev and the northern one in Novgorod. The city of Novgorod still 5 6 proudly shows many relics of its ancient glory including one of only three surviving The deep initial imprint left by the period of Puritan control persevered in later years, churches in Russia dating back to the 11th century. making the early cradle region something of an odd man out with respect to the same country it helped create. The very success of these stubborn people in the cold country From the beginnings of its history, the North closely resembled Western Europe, on stony ground was very English. In many ways, the culture and institutions of past which eventually made the region the “odd one out” with respect to the rest of Russia. and present New England are closer to those of Europe than to what became the This departure can be traced all the way from the republican government of medieval American norm. Novgorod to St. Petersburg’s role as the cradle of Russian revolutions. Due to its advantageous position for trade with Europe, the early Russian state (Novgord Rus) Almost from the outset New England was ruled by urban leaders and urban values, experienced the emergence of a mercantile city economy. In the cruel climate, where and the town came to be the focus of all life. In politics, consensus and oligarchic rule grains frequently had no time to ripen before the first frosts, non-farming occupations by the “brahman” elite deviated sharply from later mainstream U.S. democracy that (trade and crafts) were far more important. Engaged in riverine trade with places as evolved in the Core region. In economy, success was based on commercial enterprises, far afield as Persia, Novgorod was even a member of the medieval Hanseatic League of since rocky soils gave few other options. The excellent pine forests that covered large Baltic city-states. As in the Western cities of that time, artisans were divided into guilds, parts of New England were soon tapped to become masts for the British royal Navy each concentrated in its own part of the city. The political life of the North was fully and merchant ships, with ship-building, maritime trade, fishing and other sea-bound dominated by city interests, and even the huge territorial possessions of Novgorod were activities soon developing in the area itself. New England’s easterly location made it ruled as colonies to individual districts of the city. Whereas in the rest of Russia, the closest to Europe of all British holdings in North America, and for roughly 150 years, autocratic rule of the princes was already tightening and the state increasingly emulated the character of the region’s people was influenced by close commercial contacts with oriental despotism, Novgorod hired its “princes” to serve as mercenaries guarding Europe. the city’s wealth. Ruled by an oligarchy of rich merchants, Novgorod was, at least In fact, it is the distinctive Yankee culture that makes New England (along with the ostensibly, a republic, where important decisions were taken by popular vote at town South) the most recognizable of American vernacular regions, and it is habitually meetings. When Novgorod was finally subjugated to Moscow in the 16th century, the defined as the six smaller states in the northeastern corner of the U.S. However, it first deed of the new rulers was the destruction of the bell that called people for town is only in culture and stubborn self-identity that New England maintains regional meetings. integrity today. Because of its metropolitan character and the influx of suburbanites For landlocked Russia, the Northwest long remained the only window to the West. from New York City, most of the state of Connecticut is clearly a part of the Core. When Russia periodically opened to the West and experimented with pro-Western In its economy and lifestyle, even Boston is part of Megalopolis, sharply contrasting reforms, the North became a primary testing ground. Tsar Peter the Great staged the withsparsely settled parts of Maine or Vermont. And yet, all of New England has more most significant of such social experiments when in 1712 he moved the seat of than history in common: this proud cradle of the nation is today largely a bypassed region, the periphery of the national Core. 7 8 government from Moscow to newly founded St. Petersburg - a city dumped into the A Region of Grievance and Resiliance desolate swamps, far from the center of “true” Russia but close to the Europe Peter New England, in comparison to the rest of the United States, experienced the fate of a loved. teacher outstripped by her pupils. Several times the region dominated the nation as the A Region of Grievance and Resilience focus of innovation, but even as waves of new ideas were spreading out, New England was losing its leadership role. During the first century of European settlement, New The eventual relative decline of the Northwest is the typical story of an aging region England was at the top of the national ladder, attracting more immigrants than other that was once the foremost pioneering cradle. The Northwest dominated the Russian colonies. But with competition from more fertile regions, many began to leave their industrial scene first in Imperial Russia. St. Petersburg was the largest city, and, relying farms and join the migration west in search of better land. It was said that the only crop on its advantages as a capital, it ruled the industrial scene of the country. In the mid- New England’s fields could produce were rocks and that their only export was people; 19th century Petersburg was larger than Moscow by half and had twice as many and by the time of the American Revolution, the region’s leadership already was more industrial workers, but these unique advantages were not to last. The abolition of spiritual than economic. Nevertheless, it emerged once more as the national leader serfdom in 1861 triggered a swelling tide of indigenous Russian capitalism in the Core during the Industrial Revolution which had blossomed beside waterfalls in the cities region, signaling the relative decline of St. Petersburg. By 1917 Moscow had caught up of New England during the 1800s. But by the middle of the same century, misfortune with Petersburg in numbers of industrial workers and overall population. Much more again took over, and the first signs of aging and inflexibility in the once young and advantageously located for the domestic market, Moscow attracted self-made native innovative region appeared. Shipping and shipbuilding sharply declined after 1860 Russian entrepreneurs, whereas St. Petersburg’s industry was mostly controlled by because the region clung too persistently to sailing ships. The larger labor pools, coal foreigners or run by the state. The revolution of 1917 took away St. Petersburg’s status fields, and mineral deposits, and the more fully developed railroad networks of the when the capital was moved back to Moscow. The North ultimately lost its competition Core and Heartland soon placed the North in a secondary position, and by the early with the Core, and today Petersburg’s population is only half that of Moscow. 20th century the South had lured away its textile industry. During the post-World War Suspicious of its liberal traditions, Stalin routinely discriminated against Peter’s city, II transformations that resulted in the modern, high technology- and service-oriented forcing it into acceptance of the role of just another oblast center. Leningrad was left to economy, the North again experienced early success that was not sustained. The Route- take comfort in the feeling of intellectual superiority to Moscow. The city still enjoys 128 beltway around Boston became synonymous with the rapid expansion of computer a reputation as the most cerebral city of Russia, a place of refinement and high-brow and related industries in the 1960s, but the Silicon Valley of northern California soon culture. The image of the soft-spoken, polite and reserved Petersburgian is the opposite surpassed Boston-area enterprises. of the ebullient, expressive Muscovite, and Petersburghian types were always perceived Feeling outrun and bypassed since the 19th century, New England developed a sense of as the cream of Russian intellectuals. “area grievance.” While Boston natives finally acknowledged that New York’s 9 10 Although the Northwest lost its role as the economic frontrunner of the country, exceptional transportation connections gave it commercial supremacy, they never it preserves the advantages of accumulated industrial tradition and the propensity made concessions on the cultural front. One of America’s most literate periodicals, The for technical innovation. More than a mere appendage to the Core, St. Petersburg Atlantic Monthly, continues to be composed in editorial offices in Boston. Culturally, maintains its lead in high-technology industries and continues to be home to some of the region persistently lays claim to universalism and intellectualism of a rather the biggest and most technologically advanced factories in the country, such as European brand. Early on, it developed a sense of “civilizing” mission with respect Electrosila, producing super turbines for power stations, or the shipyards which turn to the rest of the nation and rendered it great service by exporting its public school out nuclear icebreakers. St. Petersburg draws such innovative firms with its highly system, high educational standards and thousands of teachers. Education remains the educated workforce; in fact, the North was long known for superior educational just source of regional pride, and residents of Northern states have some of the highest standards (even medieval Novgorod claimed a literate populace who maintained their literacy rates in the nation. A larger percentage have attended college than in most other correspondence on birchbark paper). regions, and support has been given to a dense network of private colleges including the best known “Ivy League” schools. The foremost complex of higher educational Yet beyond the sprawl of St. Petersburg, the Northwest is essentially a bypassed region. institutions in the U.S. is along the northern side of the Charles River, where Harvard For potential migrants, the Northwest does not have the “Long Ruble” rewards of areas University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sprawl in stately splendor. farther north (high salaries paid to compensate for locations where few want to live). The higher educational levels of Northern residents are reflected in their incomes. In The Northwest has been caught between the pioneer zone of the Northwoods and Massachusetts and New Hampshire, median household incomes exceed the national industrial cities of the Core, both sides luring out its population. The countryside is average by nearly 20 percent and poverty rates are well below the national average. almost empty and has turned into a mockup frontier of sorts for residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg who come here to fish, pick berries, canoe on the numerous rivers, Yet industrial resiliency and intellectual leadership are essentially limited to and enjoy vacations in cottages cheaply purchased in emptied-out villages. The once southernmost New England, while its north is a sea of forest. Hillsides of trees angle glorious ancient cities are unnoticed by passengers of express trains between Moscow down to picturesque lakes. A few cabins dot the shores, but many are empty for much and St Petersburg. The schedules of the line were put together to accommodate the of the year. Small villages center on churches and a store or two, but the sawmills, interests of bureaucrats shuttling between the two metropolises, so the trains whiz creameries, and factories around which economic life once revolved have long since non-stop through this abandoned land to be in either terminus by the beginning of closed. With the ongoing abandonment of farm land in New England, the forests business day. seem to return from their temporary exile; while in the harsh environment of the Northwoods, they never left in the first place.

11 12 THEME 1: A DIFFICULT ENVIRONMENT - THE FIRST SIBERIA THEME 1: A DIFFICULT ENVIRONMENT-THE FIRST NORTHWEST Our northern summer, swiftly flying, The seal of neglect and the economic dependence on territories to the south are In terms of landscape, the Northwoods are a preview of the great interior wilderness of The sun that brief December day In southern winter's travesty; felt even more strongly in the eastern part of the region. In this densely forested North America. In this portion of the North region, the southern boundary (starting Rose cheerless over hills of gray, And even as we are denying And darkly circled, gave at noon Its passage, it has ceased to be. Northwoods area winter lasts up to six months, and January temperatures sometimes in northwestern Minnesota and curving to the southeast) coincides with the limits of A sadder light than waning moon. More often now the sun was clouded; reach down to -80oF. Huge, sturdy houses, often two to three stories tall, were built the area dominated by conifer forests when Europeans first entered the region three Slow tracing down the thickening The sky breathed autumn, somber, from pine, and to conserve warmth, served as living quarters, grain storehouse, and centuries ago. Farther south, mixed forests fell before the lumbermen to give way to sky shrouded; cattlepen all under one roof. In terms of climate and environment, the Northwoods cropland, but in the North, the climate was too harsh and the soils too poor to permit Its mute and ominous prophecy, Shorter and shorter grew the days. is the doorstep of Siberia, while historically it served as the forerunner of the Siberian viable agriculture except on scattered dairy farms. It is revealing that historically A portent seeming less than threat, It sank from sight before it set. ~Alexander Pushkin, "Eugene frontier. the Northwoods was termed “the Northwest,” as if in anticipation of future Pacific Onegin" XL Northwest, the culmination point of the great expansion across the interior of the Initially explored by Novgorodians interested in tapping its wealth in furs, the area was ~John Greenleaf Whittier, continent. "Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl" long a frontier appendage to the Northwest. During the trade fairs of old northern cities, pelts were collected from surrounding forests and even from beyond the Urals. The settlement of the Northwoods was long retarded until loggers swept through Both Russian trappers and indigenous tribal hunters visited the fairs, and their reindeer the Upper Great Lakes in the timber boom of the late 19th century. Lumbermen teams and tents lent those northern cities a frontier flavor. The harsh nature of the were originally dominated by French Canadians from Maine, and later were mostly North inevitably hardened the northern character, creating here a pioneer spirit of self- Scandinavian. However like most activities in the Northwoods, the lumber industry reliance and independence, qualities which were strengthened by the virtual absence was Yankee-owned and directed, and “Yankee” descendants became the most dominant of serfdom in this region. Enormous expanses of land also ecncouraged wanderlust in group that settled the Upper Great Lakes states. Though the North looks split on the northerners and bred the talent for traveling great distances. The Northwoods was the map, movement between New England and the Northwoods across the Canadian birthplace of many famous explorers who pushed the boundaries of Russia into Siberia “bridge” was easy and traffic busy. The Grand Trunk and Soo Line railroads were built in the late 17th and 18th centuries. Semyon Dezhnev (the first to circumnavigate Asia across the bridge to provide access to Chicago. from the northeast), Valdimir Atlasov (who gave the Russian monarchy Kamchatka), While timber resources remain one of the mainstays of economy of the Northwoods, and Erofei Khabarov (who led the first expeditions to Maritime Far East and its geologic history helped turn the area into an important resource appendage to the Manchuria) all hailed from the Velikiy Ustyug area. The city of Tot’ma, now a small American Manufacturing Belt. If the massive glaciers that moved out of northern district center without a single paved street, even served as the de facto headquarters of Canada left in their wake rugged, barren terrain unfit for agriculture, they also brought the Russian-American trading company that ruled Alaska. the mineral wealth of Canadian Shield closer to the surface. Large-scale mining is concentrated in the impressive open pits of northeastern Minnesota where iron ore is 13 14 Yet Siberia was won not for Novgorod, but for Moscow. Novgorodian tenure in their removed from the Mesabi range. But as barges loaded with iron ore or logs float south far-flung commercial empire was always precarious. The east-west link between the down the rivers and the Great Lakes, relatively little income returns to the North since Northwoods and the Northwest was assured by rivers and portages, but the eastern area further stages of manufacture are located outside the region. remained almost unpopulated, and was eventually colonized from the south. Using The livelihoods of Northerners are dependent on the fast-paced economy of the the rivers that flow from the raised platform of Central Russia, colonists from the Core Heartland and the Core in yet another way. The eyes of Americans increasingly turn region literally floated downstream toward the low Arctic coastlines in a movement first toward the rugged yet beautiful natural environments of the North, especially to the foretold by fortified monasteries. The only obstacles to this colonization were along the resource that the North has in greatest abundance - water. The numerous lakes of the edges of the Northwoods: in the barren granite cliffs of Karelia and the equally bare North attract hundreds of thousands of visitors. Strips of summer cottages have lined foothills of the Urals, where the indigenous populations of Finno-Ugric Karelians and many of the lakefronts throughout the North for generations, and the number of Komi survive. year-round residences increased significantly in recent decades. The lakes also lure more Thus Muscovy, the newly ascendant Core of recent centuries, not only relegated the transient visitors. Minnesota state officials estimate that nearly 2 million anglers swarm Northwest to peripheral status, but also stole from its orbit the Northwoods which the surfaces of that state’s lakes during the opening weekend of the fishing season, it turned into a private resource storehouse. In economic terms, the North remains an especially impressive figure when one realizes that the entire state’s permanent a poorly integrated region: the Northwest gravitated to St. Petersburg, while the population is only 4.4 million. The North’s forests complement the lakes, providing Northwoods was tied to Moscow. Since Peter’s times the principal wealth of the what many find is an especially restful environment. Northwoods was in its boreal conifer forests, the taiga. The North exported timber, tar, But the gifts of the North are not for everyone. While many visitors enjoy the bracing wax and honey to Europe, and also became Russia’s lumberyard. Huge pulp and paper weather and the thrill of various activities, they return to their more temperate homes mills (the one in Syktyvkar is the nation’s largest) ensure the Northwoods a monopoly remarking that the North is a marvelous place to visit, but they couldn’t imagine on the Russian paper products market. Iron ore mining (especially in Karelia) and living there. Yet a significant minority of Americans find that the same characteristics bauxite mining are equally important. The new industrial projects of the Soviet period that others believe they couldn’t endure are exactly what convinces them to stay. For (such as the blast furnaces of Cherepovets) were characterized by gargantuan “Siberian” example, a number of elderly individuals have converted their recreational homes scale and also by the wide use of prison labor. The original concentration camp of -- “the lake place up North” -- into permanent residences. As a result, the band communist times was opened in 1921 on Solovetskiy Archipelago in the White Sea. of counties dubbed by geographer Phil Gersmehl as “the Midnight Sun Belt” has Political prisoners and exiles felled the forest, built coal mines, and laid new railways experienced population growth since 1970. The snow makes daily life more difficult, in the taiga and tundra. Even in recent times, prisoners accounted for every third or but the white blanket helph many places become year-round recreational destinations, fourth adult resident in the Komi Republic. as cross-country skiing and snowmobile trails follow the same paths where hikers trek during the spring and summer and leaf-watchers amble during the fall. This belt of 15 16 The cold climate of the Northwoods allowed it to preserve the purity of its culture. belt of recreation and retirement counties stretches from the Maine coast through As if kept in a “cold storage”, the villages in the area still hold to many customs, songs New Hampshire, Vermont, into northeastern New York, and reappears in northern and dress of long ago. The people speak a very distinct northern dialect, immediately Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. HOW TO GET BEREZOVIK recognized by any Russian. The survival of the indigenous Finno-Ugric-speaking HOW TO GET MAPLE SYRUP (birch wine) The North remains a place of small towns, but life in both parts of the region fully populations is another aspect of the region’s role as a refuge. Only one hundred years depends on what is happening beyond its southern border. Little wonder that many 1. Find a good sugar maple tree in Vermont 1. Find a young birch tree in the northern ago, rich collections of tales and legends which were passed orally from generation people who live in the northern parts of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota 2. wait until early spring Russian forest to generation were written down by scholars touring remote northern from the 3. tap the trunk and collect sap in a bucket 2. Wait until March or early April periodically call for secession from those states and the establishment of a new state universities of the capitals still wander around the North in the summer, but to little 4. boil in the sugar house 'til syrup forms 3. drive a splint into the trunk and collect sap called Superior, which is expected to serve this area in its own context rather than from avail. The last famous storyteller of northern epics died in the 1940s, and nowadays 5. serve on a tall stack of pancakes in bucket the perspectives that dominate in Detroit, Milwaukee or Minneapolis-St. Paul. The northern culture mostly survives in its museums and unique wooden church 6. good for what ails your soul 4. add wine and sugar; seal and store three latter metropolises are strictly peripheral to the Northwoods, and in many ways its architecture. The distinctively “nordic” stubborn culture is the major unifying bond months regional focus is still in New England. After more than two centuries of being separated 5. serve as a drink between the two parts of the North. 6. good for what ails your heart and liver by the wedge of Canada, relatively few people in New England and the Upper Great Lakes area realize the similarities of their situations, especially obvious in the “nordic” THEME 2: A STUBBORN CULTURE stubbornness of the northern culture. Lying well north of the main track of nomadic invasions, the North has preserved what many believe to be pure Russian culture. Remoteness also protected the North from THEME 2: A STUBBORN CULTURE the periodic outbursts of administrative “initiatives” from centralizing Moscow. For The challenging environment of the North may help explain the emotional reserve example, the traditions of the Old Believer Movement (which originated in the 17th and hardiness of the stereotypical northern character. Residents of the North have century as a rejection of reforms undertaken by the official church) are still alive in developed reputations for a reserved stoicism that verges on the extreme. The laconic many northern villages. In the communist period, the North suffered comparatively speech of the “Down East” residents of Maine is widely lampooned, but discussions less from militant atheistic politics, and preserved most of its distinctive stone in other parts of the North can be equally terse. The classic “town meeting” form of monasteries and wooden churches. government in New England is often characterized as seemingly endless discussions While the impacts of remote Central Russia were weak, west European influence has among townsfolk about trivial issues, but the real wonder of the North is that citizens left many tangible imprints on the region. A famous northern breed of livestock, the can condense a year’s worth of discussions about how their governments should Kholmogorskiy milk cows, were bred from Holsteins. The windmills and famed lace- function into a single night. making of Vologda evoke Holland, and architecture in and around St. Petersburg imitate European styles. A great admirer of things European, Peter saw his urban 17 18 creation as either the “Venice of the North” or as “New Holland.” Fyodor Dostoevsky, Although quiet evenness is a primary characteristic of many Northerners’ personalities, all of whose novels take place in the St. Petersburg of palaces and hovels, believed it to a certain air of superiority often underlies their attitudes. The American poet Robert be “the most abstract and conjured up city in the world.” There is something of an air Frost championed New England in his verse and represented well this regional pride. of fantasy about the place. The regular baroque layout of St. Petersburg’s center, the He wrote in his poem “New Hampshire”: numerous canals, venetian palazzos, and Italian architecture, sharply contrast with the She’s one of the two best states in the Union. charming irregularity of Russian traditions exemplified by Moscow. Vermont’s the other. And the two have been Despite this outward westernization, the North is widely held to be a refuge of “truly Yoke-fellows in the sap-yoke from of old Russian” spirit. pilgrimage of tourists from mostly urban background who stream In many Marches. And they lie like wedges, here to commune with the soul of “The Real Russia.” The apparent contradiction in Thick end to thin end and thin end to thick end, regional identity stems from an attempt by both romantic nationalists and westernized And are a figure of the way the strong intellectuals to reinterpret Russian history - rejecting its “oriental” Muscovite pages as Of mind and the strong of arm should fit together... deviations wrought by external forces, the Mongols. Since northern Russia was never The spirit of superiority that sometimes borders on smugness is energized by beliefs that conquered and did not know serfdom, qualities attributed to its population (business- Northeners have reached their present status through hard work in difficult conditions. mindedness, industriousness and self-reliance) may therefore be interpreted as “true” New England’s culture in particular has been described as moralistic. On the one side, Russian traits. there is restraint and moral idealism (especially in the attitude to hard work); on the On the other hand, one could maintain that northerners are self-centered and other, a tendency to self-righteousness and moralizing about the faults of others. Many isolationist, with aspirations to a worldliness which may be alien to people of the traits of this northern culture appear to be strikingly different from the mainstream, Russian Core. The revealing episode is the failed attempt to reform the Orthodox almost un-American. In the words of George Pierson, Northeners tend to be pessimist Church in a manner resembling North European reformation. Undertaken almost rather than optimist; introvert, not extrovert; frugal, not wasteful. The region simultaneously with the advent of Luther’s ideas in Europe, this movement was most emphasizes the importance of words and ideas as opposed to the simple calculation of successful in the rich monasteries of the North, believed by many to be the buttresses of interest. Not surprisingly, in terms of politics many states of the North are the most orthodoxy, yet perhaps more remarkable for their successful entrepreneurial activities. liberal. Wisconsin and Minnesota display the greatest extent of social experimentation From early on, the monasteries became the nuclei of settlement and economic at voters’ request, somewhat resembling the “welfare state” philosophy of Scandinavia development in the North. Even as late as the turn of the twentieth century, Solovetskiy from where many residents came. The American belief that the best governed are least Monastery owned a shipping company, a shipbuilding wharf, a hydroelectric plant, and governed has been historically weak in the region. Yet another Europe-like departure a radio station to communicate with the mainland. from the American norm may be seen in the deep social and cultural cleavages between the elite and proletarians, especially in New England. Even when the newer immigrant 19 20 Ties between Europe and the Russian North may have had their benefits, but they were underclasses (like the Irish) produced their own strong leadership, it came to emulate still overshadowed by an often icy military and political standoff. What was at stake the ways of the old aristocratic elite of New England, such as its intellectual and social was not only control over the bleak eastern shores of the Baltic in what is now modern exclusiveness. Latvia and Estonia, but also a choice which was to define the very character of Russia. In fact the uniqueness of northern culture was born largely by exclusion. Colonies While the Core to the south was being overrun by Mongols from Asia and becoming established by the Puritans were to a surprising degree free of British rule, and later a vassal state to these Asian invaders, a decisive battle was fought in the North when New England was largely self-consciously distanced from mainstream American Prince Aleksandr of Novgorod defeated the Swedes on the Neva River in the 13th developments. The resulting culture is extremely stubborn in its self-perpetuation. century. Thus the great name “Aleksandr Nevsky” came into Russian history, and his Puritans became Yankees, and in the 19th century sections of the North became victory symbollized a choice between dependency on the Mongols (many of whom dominated by the Irish, Italians, French Canadians or Scandinavians, and yet the adopted Russian culture) and struggle against crusading Germanic neighbors from political attitudes of the Catholic clan of Kennedys continue the New England Europe whose purpose was to wipe out Eastern Orthodoxy. That choice of battle front tradition. The exclusiveness of the North, which still in many ways faces across the was one of the decisive turning points for the subsequent course of Russian history as it ocean, was largely due to the fact that it was excluded from the frontier movement. saved the independence of Russian civilization and religion. Nevsky is therefore either a hero or culprit, depending on whether one’s sympathies are nativist or pro-western. As the settlers moved westward, they were blocked not so much by the mountains as by the activities of the French, established in Quebec since the early 1600s. One colonial Since the erection of the first fortresses guarding the approaches to Novgorod and leader complained that the French were “running all along by the back” of the British Pskov, Russia has tried to strengthen its northwestern borders, and has succeeded to settlements. It was the French-Canadian fur traders, the riverborne voyageurs, who some degree - it is the only place where Russia’s boundary is the same now as 1000 initially opened the Northwoods to Europeans and left on its map a rich splattering of years ago. No other part of the country has such a concentration of both ancient and French names. France ceded Quebec to England in 1763 only after a whole series of relatively recent fortresses. Peter the Great built his city as an opening to the West, British-French conflicts. But Britain discouraged its American colonists from further but the northwestern boundary of Russia seems not so much a wide-open window as incursions into the western frontierlands which would anger the indigenous tribes, a narrow embrasure in a fortress wall. This standoff on the western “front” continued and in 1763 established the Proclamation Line that ran along the western edge of New right up to the twentieth century; the Baltic states have long played the role of a England. shatterbelt between Russia and Germany. Thus annexation of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia by the USSR in 1940 may have served Stalin’s geopolitical purposes, but When Britain, rather than France, became the major opponent, conflicts continued. one can also view it as part of a cycle of revenge against Germany for defeats suffered During the War for Independence the North was the setting for many battles, such centuries before. In fact, one year later, the pendulum swung back against Russia, as a as the successful American taking of Fort Ticonderoga on the western front at Lake heroic 900 day-long defense of besieged Leningrad in World War II began. Champlain. Several decades later, the North once again framed the scene for conflict 21 22 At the same time the history of the Northwest was closely interwoven with that with Great Britain, as naval engagements occurred along the Great Lakes during the of the Baltics, conquered by Peter at the same time that Petersburg was founded. war of 1812. If all the British lands in North America had become part of the U.S., German elite from Baltic provinces traditionally made up the higher echelon of vast portions of Quebec and Ontario would have become part of the North, linking Imperial bureaucracy of Petersburg, and for Dostoyevsky and many others the city New England with the interior Northwoods; but the failure to acquire Canada left was a “German blot on the map of Russia.” In the late 1980’s Leningraders were the New England stranded on the coast. It is indeed ironic that the region that so fiercely most avid supporters of Baltic independence, some even harboring plans of a Baltic opposed European control of America was also the one that saw itself as the foothold of Commonwealth including Leningrad. European refinement in the young nation. The cousin-regions of Northwoods and New England thus became permanently separated by geographic fate, but still united in a Perhaps regions, as peoples, are the sums of opposites. The two contrasting faces of uniquely northern character and history. the North are represented by the westernized Northwest on the one hand and the ethnographic refuge of the Northwoods on the other. Blending into one in the city BOSTON founded by Peter the Great, the western and oriental streams of Russia’s soul come together in a dazzling complex of both culture and conflict. The paradoxes of the North are all on display in the city of Boston. The small peninsula known to the local Indian people as Shawmut was not particularly imposing in 1630 ST. PETERSBURG when John Winthrop and Richard Saltonstall moved there from Salem. It would have been hard to believe that by the nineteenth century, the people of Boston would On the marshes at the mouth of the Neva River, Peter the Great was determined to regard themselves as the center of the known world. Today, Boston is still proud of build a great city in the early 1700s, and St. Petersburg was thus born despite the the history that thrives on every street and draws in tourist dollars each summer along whims of the harsh northern environment. The fight cost Russia many casualties, as the “Freedom Trail.” West of Boston are more sacred spots of Americana: the green thousands of lives were lost from deprivation and disease during the construction. at Lexington and the bridge at Concord where the Revolutionary War was sparked. A Russian historian named this proud capital, boasting of its European architecture, New Englanders can be a perverse folk, stubborn in their consciences and old ties: a “paradise built on human bones.” Conceived and built as a challenge to Russia’s Concord holds a monument not only to the American colonials, but also to the British traditions, St. Petersburg has developed into a generator of social upheavals. Nowhere soldiers who fought there. And when the commander of the troops who shot down else in Russia were social gaps so wide. The accumulated “negative energy” of discontent the city’s civilians during the 1770 “Boston Massacre” needed legal counsel, he found reached critical mass in the 19th century. The city of bureaucrats and imperial triumphs help from an unlikely source: a Boston colonial lawyer named John Adams who was to was fast becoming one of the global centers of capitalism, the center of Dostoevsky’s become the second President of the United States 27 years later. Boston thrived after “The Insulted and Humiliated.” The spark that ignited the discontent was liberal independence as the core city of the North, nourished by maritime trade with Europe thought imported from the West via the city, exploding violently on the more Asiatic and a second “revolution” - this time an industrial one, as textile factories relying on the soil of Russia. A series of tumultuous events have thus torn St. Petersburg, beginning 23 24 with the abortive Decembrist rebellion in 1845 and culminating in the two revolutions water power of New England rivers brought money into the city’s economy. While of 1917. To this day, the city still spawns extreme political movements from both right the Erie Canal and superior railroad connections shifted the Core focus southward and left. to New York City, Boston’s intellectual and cultural pride was still at its peak in the nineteenth century as a series of literary figures emerged (Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Peter’s city retains its universal intellectual pretensions. It is rational and detachedly Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, and Hawthorne). Boston spawned many firsts in America: speculative, just as Moscow is irrational and feverishly active. The superb art created a college, a daily newspaper, a public school. The stuffy upper class, mainly of white in St. Petersburg bears an imprint of the west, but much of it is a refined art for art’s Anglo-Saxon Protestant ancestry and with names like Lowell, Cabot, and Winthrop sake, and something of the northern cold creeps into its beauty. Fittingly enough, (often called “Boston Brahmans”) began to believe that their city was indeed the the period of unprecedented cultural florescence at the turn of the century was called Hub of the Universe. But by the early twentieth century, Boston started a downward the Silver Age, the color of cold glitter evoking the eerie light of Petersburg’s famous slide in its economic fortune. Industry had begun to leave, while immigrant families white nights. Nostalgia for decadent arts more than fits the decaying city. A murderous arrived needing jobs. Boston became a city rich in ethnic neighborhoods, but with climate, treacherous marshes and a lack of maintenance are slowly destroying the a shrinking tax base as wealthier families moved to suburbia. By the early 1970s, a “northern Venice.” The seal of decay marks numerous palaces, many of which are now busing program to integrate Boston’s schools resulted in violence. Yet the city of Proper honeycombs of congested communal apartments, and much recent renovation has Bostonians has also been the cradle of such leaders as John Kennedy, Martin Luther only been bought by foreign investors. Many intellectuals are defecting to Moscow, King, and Malcolm X. Today, the old revolutionary zeal is alive in both the intellectual and the intolerant proletariat of the “city of revolutions” may be poising itself for a new communities of Boston and the sports fans who fill Fenway Park or scream for (and at) eruption. There is a sad beauty in the slow death of a once proud city, and the question the Bruins and Celtics. And some of the stubborn streak is still there - just try to drive remains: even if it is Leningrad that is dying, will the resurrected St. Petersburg be the or park on Boston streets. It is a city which has survived many an economic “revival” same without its lost empire? and is looking to heal the wounds of racial division. Boston may have long ago lost the battle for supremacy to New York City, but there is perhaps no other city in the U.S. which has such a strong sense of identity. The universe has been shifting around a bit, but Bostonians still know where they are.

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THE SOUTH THE SOUTH Aleksei Naumov John Florin

“As to Dikanka, I think you’ve heard more than enough about it...as to its gardens, “Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. this goes without saying: even in Petersburg, you would not find anything like that.” In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the These words belong to a simple Ukrainian beekeeper, a character in Gogol’s famous courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog series, “Evenings on the Croft Near Dikanka.” with plots that mix the realities of suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in rural life in the Ukraine with fantastic folklore stories. the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, Thanks to standard school courses on Russian literature, fictional Dikankais a well- and by nitefall were like soft teacakes of sweat and sweet talcum.” known place and an easily recognizable one: the Ukrainian village has not changed Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird much in the one and a half centuries that have elapsed since Gogol’s times. Gently rolling picturesque landscapes of benevolent South and the rural way of life in the The South has a deep, rich literary tradition tying the region of today with its past. Dikankas of today convey an image of a country idyll. To the Slavic ear, the very That past often seems set in eternal summer, with its shimmering heat, lazy days, placename Dikanka sounds cozy and lyrical. It seems to resonate with the softness and sudden rainstorms. It may be hard for Yankees to understand, but to Southerners of melodious Ukrainian speech and evokes the sounds of folk songs, which are still the heat of summer was not simply something to be endured; rather, the season’s often heard in these parts. The impression is conveyed not only by the whitewashed languid pace helped define the special character of the region, a character that made daubed brick cottages engulfed by the green of cherry tree gardens and by the gold it somehow better than the rest of the country. “People moved slowly then. They of ripe grainfields, but also by the richness of the local harvest. Moscow’s farmers’ ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time markets overflow with Ukrainian lard, early potatoes, fruits, and honey. Today, about everything. A day was twenty four hours long, but seemed longer” (Ibid). The much more than in the past, the southern village appears to be colorful and full of South in literature is also a place of small towns, courthouse squares, and farmers. life, in stark contrast to the emptied and drab villages of the North. Urban America with its Atlantas might have intruded upon the reality of the modern South, but the South of the region’s literary imagination remains firmly fixed on its more rural past.

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0 200 3 - 4 - THE SOUTH: MORE THAN UKRAINE THE SOUTH: MORE THAN DIXIE The South spills more definitively across a new international border than any of our Everybody knows the South: it is Dixie, the land of cotton and confederate flags! Yet other regions, and outlining a “south” without Ukraine would be unthinkable. Yet the reality of regional identity is much larger and more complex. In attempting to the South incorporates more than the elusive southerness of Ukrainian and southern define the South, the Southern historian Ulrich B. Phillips wrote about the region Russian culture. The region has been largely “made” by its warm climate and fertile in 1929, suggesting “Let us begin with the weather. [It] has been the chief agency in soils. In the 17th-18th centuries, the rewarding environment helped make the South making the South distinctive. It fostered the cultivation of the staple crops, which Russia’s granary, but its bounty was based even more on the backbreaking labor of promoted the plantation system, which brought the importation of negroes, which not bonded peasants, the serfs. Only in the South was the low productivity of forced labor only gave rise to chattel slavery but created a lasting race problem.” One might include (in comparison with free labor) offset by the high efficiency of nature itself. The origin the additional legacies of cultural conservatism and poverty. The war that ended slavery of the Russian derogatory word for people at the bottom of society, “chern’” (literally was fought nearly 130 years ago, but the triad of race, conservatism, and poverty (all “the black ones”) may have been in the South, where the rich black soil collaborated easily and directly attributable to the culture and economy of the region’s pre-Civil War with serfdom. The heritage of serfdom has left a lasting imprint in the region’s social plantation system) continue to be defining regional themes. By almost any measure of conservatism and persistent ruralism. regional poverty, Southern states rank at or very near the bottom. The economy of the South is still firmly rooted in the soil: 45 percent of the working But defining the area by these characteristics alone gives an incomplete story. Change is population are farmers, while another 15 percent are employed in processing farm a seemingly contradictory but almost equally well recognized component of the South’s products. Life revolves around very large villages, while most towns are small service identity. “The New South” is heard so often across the region that it has become a centers and themselves in essence glorified villages. Cozy village-like wooden cottages cliche. Prior to this century the South was a strikingly rural place, another consequence are surrounded by fruit and vegetable gardens, and even “cityfolks” cultivate plots of of its historic agricultural economy. Large cities were few and widely scattered. As late land to provide for their tables. A surprising 80 percent of the region’s territory is under as 1940 nearly half the population of states like Georgia and South Carolina were plow, which accounts for the breathtaking open landscapes of rolling fields. classified as farmers by the Census. Today the typical Southerner is far more likely to live and work in a city, and the South leads the nation in the share of its population To a large extent, the parochial agrarian society of the sleepy South is the living past. employed in manufacturing. But then again, manufacturing is no longer synonymous Its conservative culture is permeated with the ideals of peasantry, quite literally bent with progress in a service-based economy. Is it perhaps a region permanently trapped in to the soil. In the ousiders’ stereotypical view, southerners are “country bumpkins” a race to catch up with the rest of the nation? with limited horizons. Yet today’s provincial periphery has ample reason to be proud of its historic glory. The South was one of the two cradles of Slav statehood and culture, while its later frontier history largely shaped the two major successor peoples of ancient 5 6 Kievan Rus, Russians and Ukrainians, who share the region. If today the South has The Lowland South - From America’s Hearth to Periphery been cut in two by the line between Ukraine and Russia, the split is actually again I grew up in orchards The Coastal South was one of the two original hearths of the young nation, where about history - an offshoot of the old dispute over who is more senior. Reliving old where warm pears ripened, history took a course quite different from the Northern hearth in New England. From where a leaf was covered with dust, glories and quarrels, the South remains trapped in the past. Perhaps my Northern brothers will not and juicy stalks were fragrant. the outset, colonization of the South by Europeans was commercial. Immigrants into the South did not seek religious freedom, but material gain. The east coast of North believe me when I say there is a great deal Ukraine - Hearth or Periphery? of positive material I can draw from my I grew up in fields America from the Chesapeake Bay southward was, by comparison with northwest "underprivileged" background. But they where the sunrise was like a flare, From the 9th to the 12th centuries, the Ukrainian segment of our region was the Europe, an area of long, hot summers, mild winters, and substantial precipitation. It have never lived, as I have, at the end of where disturbed tillage southern hearth of that loose confederation of Eastern Slavs’ principalities known as offered the opportunity for an agricultural economy complementary to that of Europe, a long road in a house that was faced by softly steamed at noon. Kievan Rus. As with Novgorod, Kiev’s ascendancy was due to trade carried on the taking advantage of crops that could not be grown in Europe but were nevertheless in the edge of the world on one side and no- Dnieper along the route from the Varangians (Vikings) to the Greeks. But while the great demand there. body for miles on the other. They have I grew up in forests, never experienced the magnificent quiet where pines like slender waists grew pink, North was in many ways a transmitter of influences from Northern Europe, Kiev In contrast to most of colonial North America (where agriculture was based on the of a summer day when the heat is intense where dew fell heavily became the major way station for introducing Byzantine cultural models and Orthodox individually owned and family operated farm), the South shared an agricultural style and one is so very thirsty, as one moves on light blue sylvan glades. Christianity into Russia. The area was formally baptized in 988, and the temple of across the dusty cotton fields, that one with other areas of tropical and semi tropical crops in the Caribbean Basin and along Sophia was erected in Kiev as a replica of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. By the 13th learns forever that water is the essence I grew up on the Dnieper, the margins of Middle America- the plantation. century, Kiev was one of the largest and most resplendent cities of Europe. The mixed of all life. In the cities it cannot be so where blue slopes tower above, clear to one that he is a creature of the where fishermen-a not very talkative people- forest-steppe environments of the South proved conducive to farming that was far more A plantation was a large-scale business enterprise, encouraged by the combination of earth, feeling the soil between the toes, set out their nets at night. productive than in the barren forest zone to the north, while scattered riparian forests cheap land and economies of scale; its goals were cash return and export. The labor smelling the dust thrown up by the rain, provided protection from the warlike nomads who roamed the open grasslands farther requirements of the plantation generated a tremendous demand for field hands. At loving the earth so much that one longs to And the hues of those distant years- taste it and sometimes does. wherever I may go, south. After centuries of uneasy coexistence with the steppe nomads, the South was first, and especially in the Chesapeake Bay colonies, that need was met by indentured overrun and utterly destroyed by Chenghis Khans’ in 1240, and it never managed to whatever I may write, lie like a reflection servants, individuals from Great Britain who signed away their labor for a period of ~Alice Walker, "The Black Writer and on white paper. recover its focal role. years in return for transport to America and the eventual promise of obtaining their the Southern Experience", In Search own land. Well over 100,000 indentured servants migrated to Virginia alone during the of Our Mothers' Gardens, San Diego, When the South reemerged from protracted obscurity in the 16th century it was Lina Kostenko, Selected Poetry: Wanderings 17th century. By the end of that century, however, the indentured servant labor force Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983. of the Heart, translated from Ukrainian by no longer a hearth, but merely a periphery to northern Slavic culture and a bone had been largely replaced by slaves from Africa. Michael M. Naydan, Garland Publishing Inc., of contention between Poland and the young heir to ancient Rus, Muscovy. While New York & London, 1990, p. 4 (from "Earth- repopulating deserted Ukrainian lands, the Polish government also divided them The first Africans had come into Virginia as slaves back in 1619. Their forced migration ly Rays" collection, 1957) into the huge estates of Polish landlords. As no longer self-sufficient Western Europe route was the infamous triangle trade among Europe, West Africa, and the Caribbean. demanded wheat and sugar beets (for which Ukraine is ideally suited), something like 7 By the early 18th century slavery was legally established as an acceptable form of 8 colonial plantations developed, owned by Polish landlords and worked by enserfed property rights for citizens. In 1790 slaves constituted 43 percent of the population of Ukrainian peasants. What an irony that the harshest variety of serfdom evolved in South Carolina, 39 percent in Virginia, and a third of the populations of Maryland and Ukraine in direct response to the development of European capitalism. While the Georgia. North served as Russia’s window onto dynamic Northern Europe, the South recreated The plains of the lowland South created a pattern of broad, slow moving, lazy rivers the social order that was a throwback to Medieval Europe. along which export products from the plantations were shipped downstream to the Since the immense wealth accrued by the new landlords lured the old Ukrainian coast where they could be transferred to ships. The goal was to export those crops as nobility into adoption of Polish ways, the resistance to Polish atrocities and attacks efficiently and inexpensively as possible. The transport system, and thus the pattern against Slavic Orthodox culture was led by Ukranian Cossacks. These freebooters of cities, emphasized the rapid movement of goods to the coast; overland connections gathered beyond the southern boundary of the region to live by plunder. On the great between cities were few, and less important than direct economic links to Europe. The bend of the Dnieper, the Cossacks created a sort of anarchic independent republic elite also maintained close cultural ties with Europe. They sent their children there for (Zaporoz’ye Sich). At first completely opportunistic in the choice of their victims, the education, purchased their fine furniture from European craftsmen, and long clung to Cossacks gradually came to see themselves as protectors of Orthodoxy and the common the coast to maintain close transport ties with the continent. man, and during the uprising of 1648 they briefly established a virtually independent The society and economy that emerged in the South was in many ways a world of its Ukrainian state. Unable to stand on their own in the squeeze between Poland, Russia, own, with attitudes and aspirations quite different from those of the northern colonies. and the Ottoman Turks, the Cossacks chose the lesser evil and applied for Muscovy’s Many Southerners still insist that the terrible war between the North and the South protection, granted in 1654. From then on Ukrainian fate was inextricably linked with should be properly called the War Between the States, not the Civil War.In the South, that of Russia. Europeans did not come to create a new world as did the Puritans, but rather to Although the realm created by the Cossacks on the east bank of the Dnieper was for recreate the old European one and in a form that was by then disappearing in Europe a century an autonomous part of Russia, it was fast losing its distinctively Ukrainian itself. The chivalry and aristocracy of Southern society were almost a recreation of character. Wooed into the wider imperial culture and service, the self-styled Ukrainian medieval Europe, just as slavery carried European serfdom to the logical extreme. At the nobility (of former senior Cossacks) was thoroughly Russified and actually became the same time, African traditions expressed in such diverse areas a food, architecture, and greatest opponent of Ukraine’s political separateness. For a second time Ukraine lost its speech became part of the broader Southern culture, helping to further differentiate it intellectual and political leaders: first to Polonization and now to Russification. from the North. The Ukraine was clearly quite different from the rest of Slav lands, and yet itseemed Only after the Civil War was the South integrated (forcefully) into the all-American permanently reduced to peripheral status. Under the Poles, it was merely an economic economic fabric instead of being a mere appendage to European markets. Yet the region appendage to Europe. Polish Catholics, who saw non-Catholics as inferior semi- long remained something of a semi-colonial periphery, this time to the industrial 9 10 barbarians, were the first to call the South the Ukraine, a word that literally means North. With the region’s defensive withdrawal into Dixie nostalgia about past glory, the “borderland” or “periphery.” Under the Russians the Ukraine was a periphery again rest of the U.S. increasingly came to view the South somewhat condescendingly: a place and fittingly enough Russians called it Malorossiya, Little Russia. From the time that doubtlessly colorful and touchingly romantic yet certainly provincial. The Old South Peter the Great obtained a direct “window to the west” in the North, Russia was fast became “Down South” - a name defining the region in relation to its marginal nature in becoming far more westernized and secular than Ukraine, which was sinking into the eyes of northerners. provincialism. No longer just a geographic term, the name Little Russia began to acquire condescending overtones. The Piedmont, the South Claimed from the North

The Central Chernozem Region, the South Claimed from the North To the west of the southern coastal lowland from Virginia to Georgia lies the rolling upland of the Piedmont, an area once regarded as the rough, interior wildlands by the The South thus grew from two segments: a Ukrainian part that was acquired by coastal southerners. The zone of contact between the young, relatively soft, and easily Moscow as it gathered former Kievan lands under Orthodox rule and a Russian part eroded rocks of the coastal plain and the older, harder, and less easily eroded rocks that was an extension of the new Muscovite Core, conquered and settled from the of the Piedmont is marked by a stretch of waterfalls or series of rapids which bar the north. upstream movement by river boats. One consequence is that for much of the colonial period this Fall Line served as an effective barrier to the westward expansion of the After the Mongol conquest, the forest-steppe south of the Oka river remained plantation economy and its demand for cheap water transport. The line is straddled by practically deserted, and came to be known as the Wild Field, disputed between a series of towns (from Richmond to Montgomery) initially established to deal with Russians and the nomads. While Russians gradually moved south along the river the transfer of goods shipped across the line or to take advantage of the water power valleys, the nomads annually made plundering raids north along the dry watersheds. generated by harnessing the tumbling streams. Moscow itself was last burned by the Tatars in 1571, finally spurring the government into decisive southward expansion. To obstruct the advance of mounted Tatars, fortified In the first half of the 17th century, the uplands were occupied substantially by margins pushed south to the Belgorod line, coinciding with the present southern settlers who wandered southward from Pennsylvania down the Great Valley (called the boundary of the region, completed in the 1650s at the same time as the acquisition of Shenandoah in Virginia) and then through gaps in the Blue Ridge. By the 1730s the Ukraine. Since the area was settled by Russians from the Core, a sharp ethnic boundary Great Philadelphia Wagon Road marked the route. The result was that the Piedmont separates it from Ukraine even to present day. Yet the original capitals of both the population was largely white, and often German, into the early national period. With Ukrainian realm (Baturin) and the Soviet Ukraine (Khar’kiv) were located on this comparatively few slaves the Piedmont had notably lower black percentages than the boundary which stitched together this Russian portion of the South and the “Old” coastal plain areas of the old cotton and tobacco belts. In the late 18th and first half of Ukrainian South. the 19th century thousands of white migrants from the region, seldom rich but usually individualistic, carried the distinctive Upper Southern culture westward. 11 12 This Russian part of the South has been called the Central Chernozem region, the In the decades after the American Revolution plantation the economic life of the epithet “Central” reflecting the region’s key economic role and central location. The country rushed into the Piedmont, led by cotton production. With a rapidly growing area “made” by the Core was also central in the sense that it helped shape Russian population, the region eventually surpassed the coastal lowlands in economic and serfdom. The southern frontier attracted thousands of peasants who fled the tax burden demographic clout. In a symbolic severing of the umbilical cord to the Old World, imposed by the centralizing state (not least for the purpose of guarding this same state capitals were relocated from lowland (and thus colonial) to piedmont (by southern frontier). The drain bled Russia, which needed both money and armies. The definition non colonial) locations Virginia’s from Williamsburg to Richmond, North attachment of peasants to the land became the answer to military challenges of the Carolina’s from New Bern to Raleigh, South Carolina’s from Charleston to Columbia, frontier, and little wonder that it occurred between the 1550s and 1649 - exactly the and Georgia’s from Savannah to Atlanta. When the dominant focus on agriculture in period of southward expansion. Ironically, the very freedoms of the frontier reinforced the South began to erode in the 1880s, the development of manufacturing focused on the emerging system of universal serfdom. The region that had been the Wild Field the Piedmont. The lead was taken by the relocation of the cotton textile industry away became the Russian Field, the outwardly serene stronghold of landowning gentry that from New England to the rolling hill country from south central Virginia across the was the pillar of the conservative political and social system of pre-capitalist Russia. central Carolinas to northern Georgia. In part this resulted from the local availability of abundant water power resources. THEME 1: ECONOMY BASED ON HERITAGE OF INJUSTICE In many ways the Piedmont became “another” South, largely shaped by the North By the early 18th century the South had lost its frontier character, and its lands were which first sent down its settlers; a century later, northern carpetbaggers and companies occupied by larger estates. While serfdom existed over all of European Russia, its forms presided over the birth in the Piedmont of the industrial South. The Piedmont can varied and were nowhere so entrenched as in the South. In the less fertile northern perhaps be seen as the formative area for the New South, a South which was already regions, the labor duties of serfs were reduced to payment of a money rent, which the more than just the old Dixie. peasants were free to generate by pursuing any trade. The system paved the way for the eventual growth of commercial enterprise in villages and towns. In the South, on THEME 1: ECONOMY BASED ON HERITAGE OF INJUSTICE the other hand, an obligation to provide actual labor prevailed, and a number of days For over three centuries Southern culture was dominated by the legacy of the plantation every week had to be devoted to work in the landlord’s fields rather than on the serf’s system. Virginians began exporting tobacco from their James River settlements in the own plot. Normally a whole village would belong to a single landlord, and the strong early 1620s. Despite the lament of many that it was a “noxious weed” that was sure institution of the village commune enforced collective compliance, while at the same to damage the health of its users, the acquired taste and demand for tobacco swept the time stripping the individual of responsibility and initiative. A high southern culture continent. By the end of the 17th century the coastal swamps of South Carolina and may have developed among the landowning class, but it was paid for by serfs who lived Georgia had become a major source for rice and indigo. Long staple (or Sea Island) in poverty and ignorance. 13 14 However, the big landowners and lowly serfs were only the two extremes of a rigidly cotton emerged early in the 18th century as a major export of the agricultural lands of hierarchical social system. The number of serfs barely exceeded 50 percent of the the many islands lining the shores of those two colonies. CHICKEN, KIEV-STYLE population, while at least a third were the so-called odnodvortsy, the “poor whites” of Prior to the Civil War the system led to the economic, political, and social domination FRIED CHICKEN, SOUTHERN- the Russian South. They were a vestige of frontier history, when free people of humble of the region by a small group of influential white plantation owners. Contrary to STYLE 6 chicken breasts halves, boned origin had to be lured to settle on the land in exchange for state service. Squeezed out and flattened common perception, most Southern farmers who produced plantation crops worked 1 chicken cut into pieces 1/2 cup cold butter cut into six by large estates, these semi-gentry grew impoverished but fiercely defended their social their own land, but this numerically predominant group of white “yeoman farmers” 2 eggs pieces status. The majority had no serfs and were not much better off, but never mingled with was marginal in terms of political and economic power. A willingness to respect the bread crumbs seasoned with salt and pepper 3 tbsp chopped green onions the lowest classes and strongly disdained the notion of working for someone else. The leadership of the plantation aristocracy led to a kind of conformism in this group: while flour for dredging, oil for frying 2 eggs, beaten odnodvortsy were a uniquely southern social layer, sharing with serfs a reputation for 1 cup bread crumbs they seldom owned slaves, they readily accepted the need for slavery. At the same time, sloth, poverty, and ignorance. Simmer chicken 20 minutes in saucepan. salt and pepper many in the aristocracy were members of early abolitionist societies, the majority of Dry on paper towels. Coat with flour, dip in flour for dredging; oil for frying Thanks to the institution of serfdom, all layers of southern society lived by a hierarchy which were located across the South. However, by the time of the Civil War acceptance beaten egg, roll in bread crumbs. Fry in hot of status and privilege. Southeners acquired a conformist respect for authority and of the economic rationale for slavery had changed this attitude. oil. Serve with cream gravy. Place butter in middle of each brute force. At the same time, the suppressed peasantry of the region learned to be chicken breast, sprinkle with salt, Cotton production moved westward across the lowland and Piedmont South and cunning and secretive. Outwardly demonstrating faithfulness to the existing social pepper, and green onion. Roll up, northward as far as southeastern Missouri and southern Illinois during the first half dredge in flour, dip in egg, roll in order, they learned to effectively dodge work while trying to benefit from the system in of the 19th century. The development of machines that could remove the small seeds, bread crumbs. Fry in hot oil. any possible way. Ukrainian literature in particular espouses the trickster types, perhaps or lint, from short staple cotton encouraged the geographic expansion. The rich black simple-minded but achieving all they need on the sly. soils of the Deep South were ideal for cotton, and soon the area’s population became In contrast to the somewhat paternalistic serfdom of the Russian South, modified by predominantly Black as well. The aristocratic paternalism of Old South was replaced by the enlightened aristocracy of the Russian gentry, serfdom achieved its ultimate and a harsher, more strident relationship between purely business-oriented slaveholder and harshest form in the West Bank Ukraine. That area remained in Polish hands until slave, and the Deep South became the ultimate expression of the slave-based economy. 1793, and Polish landowners were capitalists, not aristocrats. Even in 1850 about The President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was a Missisippi senator, and the 5000 Polish magnates in the West Bank Ukraine owned 90 percent of all land and 1.2 headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan were in Tuscaloosa. Little wonder that Alabama million serfs; this was the truly “Deep” South. became the scene of fiercest fighting during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, and Martin Luther King started his crusade in Birmingham. Altogether, the South was the major area of commercial agriculture. West Bank Ukraine produced the bulk of Russian sugar, while East Bank Ukraine accounted for half of the In the pre-Civil War United States, the toil of the slave turned the South into a pillar of output of tobacco and alcohol was distilled in both areas. At least 70 percent of all wealth and power. Many of the first presidents of the new nation were drawn from 15 16 cultivated lands owned by the Russian nobility were in the South, and only Virginia. The South was the major region of export economy during much of the their resistance delayed the final abolition of serfdom until 1861. In a sense, the country’s early national period. On the eve of the Civil War cotton, exported almost emancipation of serfs was a victory of the industrial-capitalist North of Russia over the entirely from the South, accounted for to-thirds of total exports from the United States retrograde South, and it dealt the region a deadly blow. by value.

Decline and Conservatism Decline and Conservatism Neither the serfs nor their masters could easily adapt to Emancipation. Freed serfs With the end of the Civil War and the advent of slave emancipation in 1863, the received little land, but had to pay heavy “redemption debts.” Many estate owners (such South, which had been one of the wealthiest regions, was suddenly the nation’s as described in Chekhov’s classic “Cherry Orchard”) proved to be lousy entrepreneurs poorest. Plantation owners found their assured labor force gone and their property and went bankrupt. In Chekhov’s play the nobleman returns to his dilapidated often destroyed, while freed African-Americans were assured of political rights and hereditary estate to sell it to a nouveau riche capitalist, who has already scheduled quickly gained many elected positions. This period of change was short lived, and a the destruction of the pride of the estate - the cherry orchard with all its nostalgic decade after the war the region had returned to something remarkably like its old self. memories. The fragmented fields of southern peasants could not compete with the As sharecropping replaced slavery after 1865, control shifted from slavery to the crop huge, flat geometric fields of the new national granary that developed in the once lien system, where a merchant (also often a land owner) provided basic needs of the empty grasslands of southern Ukraine. The fertility of the long mercilessly exploited sharecropper’s family in return for a portion of the crop. The system encouraged eternal soils sharply declined, while in the more southerly steppes rich virgin black earth indebtedness. For decades after the war many landless rural southerners, both black and abounded. white, never had the opportunity to accumulate the capital needed to improve their circumstance. The old estate economy relied on the serfs’ numbers, but the emancipated South found itself overpopulated. Industrial growth was as phlegmatic as the proverbial southern Blacks, while now free, found that slavery had been replaced by institutionalized character and provided no outlet for landless peasants. Although the South acquired a segregation enforced by a series of “Black Codes” that restricted access to economic widely dispersed sugar-refining and grain-milling industry, most of the development opportunity outside agriculture and to educational opportunities. In the 1890s impetus came from the North. In Ukraine, Ukrainians hardly participated in the the states of the South began passing so called “Jim Crow laws” that legalized the city-based commerce and industry at all. While northeners moved hundreds of miles segregation of the races in a wide variety of areas. In education, southern states south to the local factories, land-craving southerners preferred massive exodus to provided separate systems for whites and blacks. While the U.S. Supreme Court in new agricultural frontiers thousands of miles east. The southerners, and especially Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) had given its approval to the separation provided the two Ukrainians, made up the majority of migrants into the newly opened southern systems were equal, the reality soon became white systems with vastly superior resources grasslands of Russia all the way to the Far East, and even to the USA. 17 18 Following a brief breathing spell after the 1917 revolution, the region suffered a near- compared to their black neighbors. Segregation eventually permeated nearly every complete resurrection of serfdom in the guise of the collective farm (kolkhoz). Under aspect of southern life. Stalinist socialism, labor duties reappeared in the form of obligatory work to be done Blacks were excluded from some urban occupations and industries (such as cotton on the collective fields. Until the 1970s, the peasants were even denied freedom of textiles) or confined to the lowest paying jobs. This trend was to dominate Southern migration. Little wonder that once “the second emancipation” of the later Soviet industrialization until well into the last half of the 20th century. Manufacturing was period arrived, a new exodus followed, and Southerners made up the majority of high located in areas of largely white populations, sections away from the centers of the wage-seeking migrants to Siberia. Today the population of the South is a staggering plantation economy. Stranded Black populations had no option but to migrate to 11 million less than it was in 1897, but even so its heavily rural population is second the industrial centers of the north, sparking the great exodus that so altered the racial only to the industrial-urban Core of the country. Farming gives proof of the relative composition of the northern metropolis. immutability of the South. Although its productivity today is among the highest in Russia, it still loses to the Breadbasket in terms of scale and specialization. The region The institution of slavery, and later the widespread availability of cheap labor (often itself essentially consumes its agricultural bounty. But then self-sufficiency is exactly black) limited European immigration to the South, as reflected in the insularity of its ideal. The South always tended to revert to comfortable subsistence whenever ethnic identities in the region (largely English and Scots- Irish). Shunned by new central power was weakened. The latest such period arrived in the 1970s when the immigrants and losing its own population, the South rapidly slipped down on the more laissez-faire policy of Moscow allowed southern peasants to farm private plots. scale of population that had given it so much political leverage in the past. Whereas in The southerners’ creative tendency to circumvent the system helped them to work 1810, Virginia was the nation’s most populous state, and Virginia and North Carolina out a comfortable modus vivendi with the kolkhoz. A few pigs secretly fattened by together accounted for one-third of all U.S. population, by the time of the Civil War, fodder stolen from kolkhoz fields bring the southerner a good annual income on top the share of these two states had declined to 10 percent. With a growing local sense of guaranteed pay. Stripped of initiative by centuries of serf labor, southerners are not that the area had been treated poorly, the two terms best defining southern culture eager to assume the insecurities of private farmers. The region lags behind the rest of were conservatism and loyalty. To many in the region, the two have a close meaning, Russia in the spread of private farms, as the kolkhozes carry on. The region spawned a defining loyalty to the past and to tradition. corps of collective farm chairmen, a strongly conservative lobby in new Russian politics Former President Lyndon Johnson, proudly Texan, referred to himself as a “Yellow Dog and worthy successors to the big landowners of the South who once dominated the Democrat” given a choice, he would rather vote for a yellow dog than for a Republican. Emperor’s ultra-conservative Private Council. That statement was one most southerners clearly understood and supported. The southerners’ conservative political culture largely rests upon a respect for the Democrats presided over a period when black disenfranchisement and segregation were existing order and reliance on the wisdom of traditional superiors. During the first institutionalized. For decades state legislatures were prohibitively Democratic. The Soviet free elections in 1988, the region overwhelmingly elected the old communist system that developed placed most real power in the hands of a small group of elected 19 20 party functionaries and emerged as a bastion of political conservatism. Outwardly officials and party leaders, tended to encourage lengthy stays in office, and gave conformist, southerners actually seem indifferent to politics, as long as they are left the South a powerful say in national politics through seniority control over many alone to quietly enjoy fruits of the land. Even the political tempest of Ukrainian Congressional committees. Only in the 1940s did the Democratic Solid South (at least independence left most southerners cool: within a one-year period a strong majority of at the national level) begin to erode, as the increasing liberalism of the party scared off Ukrainian residents (including Russian-speakers) voted first for the preservation of the many whites while attracting black voters. Former Southern Democrats fiercely loyal to Soviet Union and then for independence. Be it in politics or modernization, the South the tradition argue that they have not left the Democratic party - the party left them. came to stand for conservatism as much as the North stands for experimentation. The South’s white voters often support Republicans now, favoring conservative values reflected in their religious as well as political lives. Southerners of most stripes are THEME 2: HOW INDEPENDENT IS AN INDEPENDENT SOUTH? much more likely to attend church regularly than are people in most other sections Change has not completely bypassed the South. Its economic rebirth started in the of the country; their Sunday mornings, and at least one evening each week, are given 1960s when the North again reached into the south with new industrial enclaves such over to church activities. Southern white Protestants are more likely than other white as the metallurgical complex of the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly. The two largest cities Protestants to listen to religious shows on radio and television and to name a religious of the South, Kiev and Voronezh, have emerged as economic capitals of respectively person (usually Billy Graham) as their most admired individual. Most southern religion Ukrainian and Russian parts of the region, and were chosen as sites for many labor- is conservative, evangelical, and democratic. Northerners were often surprised by the intensive, high-tech industries such as electronics and aircraft building. Yet industrial strong church involvement on both sides of the Civil Rights movement; in fact, it was centers are few, and the share of the South in Soviet national industrial output was still just part of the participatory nature of southern religion. below its share of population. With urban population barely one half of the total, the Over nine in ten southerners identify themselves as Protestants. Fully half of those are South remained the least urbanized of the Slavic regions of the former USSR. Southern Baptists, and a majority of the remainder are Methodists. Blacks are even Maybe a more valid sign of the recent revival of the South is the fact that the southern more likely to be members of (usually all black) Baptist or Methodist churches. The villager is now better off than those in the north, the reverse of previous patterns. Southern Baptist Convention was created in 1845 in a dispute with northern Baptists Surreptitious farming on private plots, with the produce of the fertile South carried over slavery and sectionalism. It emerged from the war as one the most important to markets in the North, brought a modicum of prosperity. Statistically speaking, the molders and carriers of southern culture. A map of Southern Baptists today is very southern standard of living still lags behind that of more northerly parts of Russia, much a map of the South and of those places to which southerners have migrated in particularly with inflation problems in post-independence Ukraine, but few southerners large numbers. would agree that their quality of living is inferior. In the USSR, where the chronic food problem made the easy availability of good food a major yardstick of well-being, the THEME 2: HOW NEW IS THE NEW SOUTH? South acquired a new stereotypical image of the land of satiety. Actually, support of 21 The last half of the twentieth century has seen a remarkable integration of the South 22 Ukrainian independence among common people largely rested on the premise that into the national economy, coupled with the breakdown of racial segregation. Some Ukraine is a cornucopia feeding “hungry” Russia, and it would be even better fed if left viewed the revitalized economy and social changes as evidence that a “New South” was alone. emerging. In 1880, 90 percent of the nation’s textile production was centered along the streams and coastlines of New England, but in the following decades what had been On a different plane, Ukrainian independence can be seen as the culmination of a a trickle of economic change developed into a flood. By the 1910s half of the cotton long southern resistance to peripheral status, and easily the most important harbinger textile industry was in the South, and by 1940 the industry was largely southern. of the arrival of some “New” South. What had been grievances related to geographic Cotton textiles were a low skill, low wage industry, and a prime attraction of the South discrimination became a sense of national consciousness in Ukraine, following a was the availability of a large and poor labor force. pattern typical for Eastern Europe. Since local loyalties of the traditional elites were lost to wider political entities, the future nation had to be bound by ethnicity, the path World War II brought a new level of economic change to the South. The federal beginning with the “reinvention” of language and culture. For centuries, the Ukrainian government invested billions in new and expanded military bases and defense plants language was considered a lowly peasant dialect unfit as literary medium. The best in the region. The farm population fell 20 percent while farm incomes flourished. For known writer produced by Ukrainian soil, Gogol, refused to consider Ukrainian a the first time in recent history, much of the region’s people, especially its whites, had fit language even for his burlesque novels. Only by the 1850s was the new Ukrainian a disposable income. The boom continued after the war, as entrenched politicians in (constructed as a sum of several regional dialects) becoming recognized, largely due to Washington used their influence to send development into their districts. Georgia the efforts of Ukraine’s greatest poet, Shevchenko. Yet Ukrainian national consciousness legislators, for example, helped make defense contractor Lockheed the largest private is a very recent phenomenon: even three generations ago, most Ukrainians still employer in their state. Huntsville, Alabama, emerged as a major center for space called themselves “Little Russians”, khokhols, or “locals.” Ukrainians, rather than exploration and research. In North Carolina, the state’s governor encouraged the Russifiers from Moscow, demanded Russian-language schools for their children, so creation of what became the highly successful and emulated Research Triangle Park. that they could advance beyond the limited opportunities existing in the rural South. Many national and international manufacturers established southern plants in response Throughout recent decades the use of the Ukrainian language in schools, publishing, to the region’s new wealth and demand for products. and even daily life has been steadily declining. Atlanta especially boomed with a concentration of a broad spectrum of firms choosing In Russia, the establishment of the protectorate over Ukraine in 1654 has been viewed to establish regional management centers in the South’s centrally located economic as the reunification of peoples sharing common descent from Kievan Rus. Since capital. Perhaps nothing better symbolizes the “arrival” of the New South than Atlanta’s Russians were the only surviving political heirs to “the glory that was Kiev,” they felt success, personified by the election of President Jimmy Carter in 1976 and the selection themselves to be the elder brothers, or Greater Russians. Because the Ukrainian and of the city as the host of the 1996 summer Olympic games. Russian culture and language are very close, it seemed logical to see their differences Meanwhile, a combination of local civil rights demonstrations and actions of federal as the result of a temporary separation. Ukrainians were Little Russians, or younger courts and the U.S. government eroded much formalized segregation. In 1940 only five brothers that could be expected to blend eventually with “true” Russians of Muscovy. 23 24 The provincialism of Ukraine gave the Russian view some credence. Ever since percent of voting age black southerners were registered, but by 1955 the share had “Evenings on the Croft near Dikan’ka” Ukraine has been seen as a picturesque and increased to 25 percent. By 1969, after the Voting Rights Act eliminated nearly all romantic ethnographic corner of Russia, the preserve of lyrical folklore and songs. In special barriers to black registration and voting, nearly two thirds of African-American the Soviet “family” of peoples, Ukraine was the privileged but junior partner, second adult Southerners were registered. Blacks have been elected mayors in several large among equals. southern cities and scores of smaller ones, governor of one state, and to the supreme courts of most states in the region. Federal Supreme Court decisions in the late The Ukrainian counterargument to Russian claims of seniority is that the true Kievan 1980s concerning proportional representation resulted in the 1992 election that sent heritage was passed on to future generations not through Muscovy (peripheral to southern blacks to state legislatures at the U.S. House of Representatives in numbers Kievan Rus) but Ukraine. In Russians such claims cause fits of laughter: imagine approximating the black share of their state’s population. a family where a younger brother declares himself to be elder! This laughter is true to the long Russian tradition of seeing Ukraine as a humorous place. Following the Although inherited racism is still a vibrant theme in Southern life, the erosion of the lead of Gogol, Ukraine came to be seen as almost a parody of Greater Russia. This institution of segregation and the impact of that erosion have been real. More blacks Russian amusement is all the more offensive to Ukrainians because of its family- now hold public office in the South than in any other section of the country. In the like, condescending nature. Since Ukraine was in no way discriminated against or 1980s the average income of black southerners increased while declining nationally, and lagging behind Russia economically, such condescension is the major irritant that surpassed that in the Midwest. Most dramatically, perhaps, more blacks now migrate provokes Ukrainian anti-Russianism. Russia and Ukraine seem to be tragically unable to the region than leave it, a change reversing a dominant trend of much of the century to understand each other. It may be unavoidable for such closely related peoples that that would have been unimaginable at the time of the passage of the Voting Rights Act. antagonism toward Russia becomes almost the sole basis for shaping Ukrainians’ Economically, the region may still rank at the bottom in most measures of well- separate identity. Even Russian laughter is used to Ukrainian advantage: the first being, but the bottom is not nearly so far from the top as it once was. In 1910 a poor president of newly independent Ukraine once said that “it’s better to appear crafty, than Southern state might have an income half that of the average for non Southern states, ominous.” People are not afraid of what is funny, and while Russians refused to take it but by 1990, it was more likely to be 85 percent of the average for the rest of the seriously, Ukraine slyly emerged as Eastern Europe’s second-largest state, gaining more country. However, it is important not to overstate the real meaning of this change. territory from the Soviet dissolution than any other successor republic. While many Southerners consider the upward trend momentous, it unfortunately in part reflects the opposite: progress looks good because the starting level was so low. The region is still the poorest in the country, and its overall rate of economic growth compared to the national average has slowed after the spurt of the 1960s and 1970s.

25 26 One South or Many? One indicator that the South may be stuck in its relatively poor economic situation is its persistent ruralism. The plantation South had little need for towns and cities, and Even at its zenith (1648-1667) the historic forerunner of independent Ukraine small market centers or the coastal plantations were enough to serve as local collection included only the Ukrainian portion of the South, less than half of the area of the and transshipment points; larger cities were not needed, and therefore few in number. modern Ukrainian Republic. Interestingly enough, this historic Ukraine played little Today in such states as Georgia and South Carolina, fewer than one person in 25 can part in the independence movement fermented by the aggressive nationalism of be thought of as farmers. But even though most Southerners have urban occupations Galicia (the westernmost part of Ukraine that had a completely separate history from they preserve a strong link with the countryside. The Carolinas, and the South in the 13th century until 1939) and emboldened by the economic muscle of southern general, lead the nation in what the census calls the “rural non farm” population, i.e. Ukraine, which belongs to the Breadbasket region. The Russian Empire wrested the people who live in the country but have a city job, people who love their family farms southern grasslands from the Ottomans and nomads and largely settled the region but now earn a living elsewhere. with Russians. The historic separateness of Breadbasket Ukraine is well highlighted by a language division in which Russian-speakers even slightly outnumber Ukrainian- One South or Many? speakers. Adding Breadbasket ethnic statistics into all-Ukrainian figures is routinely used as false proof of Ukraine’s Russification. In reality, the Ukrainian language prevails Change has created a Southern economic (and, in many ways, social) geography in the historic Ukraine, where 90 percent of the population call Ukrainian their mother that looks a bit like a wildly distorted checker board. “Integration into the national tongue. economy” in fact means the growth of cities with activities that are not much different from cities elsewhere in the U.S. Large cities have dominated the South’s economic Deep historic and cultural cleavages persevere even within this Ukrainian portion of the surge, while much of the rest of the South has experienced far less change. The South. The Dnieper remains a major divide. The East Bank is the most “authentically” traditions of Georgia, however lacking they may seem in Atlanta, are alive and well Ukrainian part of Ukraine. Due to a relatively short period of serfdom and the absence across much of the rest of the state. of the village commune system, East Bankers have a reputation as the most thrifty and entrepreneurial of all Southerners. The East Bank experienced only a short period of Is there more to the “South” than the geographic south itself? The region defined here Polish rule, while centuries of almost unperturbed control had strongly Polonized the may be only part of a wider southern cultural entity, yet perhaps the divisions may well West Bank. The West Bank’s villages were dominated by Polish nobles, and its cities by be more visible than factors which bind the region together. In the United States, we Jewish merchants, while the East Bank was long dominated by native Cossack elite and speak of many Souths: thus, Appalachia was settled by southerners, but this Upland developed an egalitarian ethos. Through ties of common history, East Bank Ukraine has South was so oppposed to the social system of planters’ domination in the Lowland a strong kinship with Russia, while the West Bank gravitates to the West. Only Kiev South that it took the side of the Union in the Civil War. The area consisting of serves as a unifying link for these two parts of Ukraine. adjoining parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri, known as the Border South, combines cultural proximity to the South proper with economic orientation to 27 28 The scale of differences between parts of Ukraine is comparable to that between the the North, and characteristically tried to stay neutral in the Civil War. Both areas never Ukrainian and Russian parts of the South. The customs and ways of life of Ukrainians had high proportions of black population. Even the remaining “South proper” is a and Russians in the region are strikingly similar, and this close proximity seems obvious territory of great physical and cultural diversity. Its pattern of internal variation can to outside observers. Thus the southern dialect of Russian language seems to speakers perhaps best be thought of as the joint beat of two rhythms: the Lowland Piedmont of standard Russian to be almost Ukrainian and just as “funny.” At the same time the economic dualism on the one hand and the east west extension of the original southern majority of Ukrainians in reality speak the so-called surzhik, a Russo-Ukrainian mixture hearth on the other. The Old South embraces the Virginian and South Carolinian driving the purists to apoplexy. The traditional Ukrainian pejorative for Russians, core areas linked by North Carolina. Although it was the cultural metropolis of the moskali, literally means Muscovites, and conveys very southern resentment toward Old South, in terms of the plantation economy Charleston may be thought of as the big government and northerners rather than toward fellow-Russians in the South. In easternmost point of the Deep South extending to Mississippi. The newest parts of fact, among those who hail from the South itself, the feeling of a common southern the South are the Yazoo Delta area, the agricultural lowland between the Mississippi culture is stronger than ethnic divides. A good example is Nikita Khrushchev, a typical and Yazoo rivers in Mississippi (often simply called locally “The Delta”) and the Piney mercurial southerner who first brought southern speech into the Kremlin halls. Born in Woods. Both were not developed until after the Civil War, but were important parts a Russian village in the south of Kursk Oblast, he made his political career in Ukraine of the cotton belt and strong supporters of the Confederacy. Today, the “Delta” is a and favored the republic in many ways, including the generous transfer of the Crimea productive agricultural region dominated by large, often corporate farms producing from Russia to Ukraine in 1954. Today the dispute over the Crimea is among issues huge quantities of soybeans, rice, cotton, and pond grown catfish. The Piney Woods, that antagonize the two states, but among common people relations are as cordial as where the South reaches into East Texas and Oklahoma is today a densely wooded, ever: after all, according to the 1988 data, about half of all marriages in Ukraine were economically marginal region famous for its wildlands. However distinct, the between mixed Russo-Ukrainian couples. While irresponsible politicians quarrel over flamboyant Texan culture is unmistakably southern in its foundations, and the strong maps, the people of the South know better. native American ingredient to Oklahoma’s mix reminds one that Oklahoma territory was a receptacle for Indians deported from the South. Deep South, Upland South, Old South, Lowland South: each section of the region is distinct and somewhat isolated from the others, contributing to a regional pattern of cultural provincialism seen in the strong sense of local identity. Southerners are not just Southerners they are Tarheels (Central North Carolinians), or residents of the Bootheel (of Missouri), or from the Valley (of Virginia). But despite very real internal variations, southerners and non southerners alike nearly universally identify the South as a separate and special place. When asked where they would most like to live, only Californians 29 30 are as likely as Southerners to say “right here.” They may well dislike the obvious disadvantages of their region (low wages, poverty), but southerners still have a special fondness for the South, and are likely to say that the best state is their own. Money is important, but the sense here is that it is not the only important element in a region’s quality of life. “American by birth, Southern by the grace of God” is an often seen bumper sticker proclaiming a strong regional allegiance. The common opinion of people living elsewhere in the country is that the region is separate and somehow different, and no other section of the country possesses such regional persistence. Southerners know they are a people set apart in their own country, and gain a regional solidarity from their own sense of distinctiveness.

31 32

THE HEARTLAND THE HEARTLAND Raymond Krishchyunas and Aleksei Novikov Thomas Baerwald

The beautiful provincial town of Yelabuga cozily nests on the high shore of It was the end of another day, and as he left the mammoth River Rouge the Kama River right across from the huge industrial city of Naberezhnie industrial complex, the worker mused about the immense contrasts that Chelny. Little in the town hints of the typical dull vistas of Russia’s industrial repeatedly confronted him. Within miles of crumbling brick factories heart just on the other side of the river: you cannot even hear the hum of abandoned decades ago were stylish steel structures within which the massive truck assembly lines or the screeching noise of nearby oil computer-controlled robots assembled new vehicles while workers rigs. Surrounded by industrial giants, Yelabuga manages to preserve the maintained supervisory watches. The gleaming glass-walled offices of charm of an old merchants’ town. Well-built squat and solid stone houses multi-national corporations stood beside modern shopping malls and with warehouses on the ground floor hide behind secure iron-clad doors hotels, which were connected by an automated transport system of small and window trellises. The vistas from the Kama shore would do nicely vehicles scurrying along on elevated monorails. After a few turns, however, on the cover of a “Beauty of Russian Landscape” photo album. And yet, the worker drove down a thoroughfare that might well have been in 1970s paradoxically, the runaway industrialism of the Heartland provides the Beirut, as numerous small shops and restaurants owned by Lebanese necessary contrast that makes Yelabuga seem like such an idealized and other Middle Eastern immigrants crammed into storefronts that once Russian scene. Little wonder that the Russian landscape painting tradition housed German markets. originated in the Heartland, and its founder, Ivan Shishkin, was born, lived, He passed through areas where small, battered houses stood amid weed- and discovered inspiration in Yelabuga. and asphalt-covered lots and zones where mansions lay protected behind The city seems a strange spot indeed, all the more so because this very security gates and dense woods. The latter clearly spoke of the promise Russian place and archtype of Russian landscapes ironically is located on that so many people had realized in the area. But as the man listened to Tatar land. radio news reports of industrial plant closings and a new wave of random murders, he realized that for many people, the promise was past and the future looked grim.

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The region that embraces the middle section of the Volga river basin is the land which Soon after he resigned as President of General Motors to become U.S. Secretary of is the cornerstone of the sprawling Russian state. The Core may bind the country with Defense in 1953, Charles Wilson stated, “For many years I thought what was good for invisible threads of political and intellectual control, but the Heartland cements Russia our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.” This declaration generated through its pivotal location and intense economic metabolism. While the Core had to considerable controversy, as many Americans objected to its implicit assertion that build its supremacy purposefully by imposing over Russia a spidery web of radial roads, a primary role of government was to serve the interests of private corporations. That the Heartland is Russia’s predestined transportation hub. Here the mighty north-south perspective still engenders lively debate nearly a half-century later, but from another tending trunk of the Volga branches to the west and the east, and this tree-shaped perspective, Wallace’s observation that the fates of major companies like General river system provides easy outlets into Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Siberia. In the Motors and the nation as a whole are highly correlated still rings true. When the era before railways, this great inland waterway was Russia’s commercial mainstreet, nation’s economy booms, when most people are working, when sales are high, General and later the road of trade became the road of industry. If the Core is an emanation of Motors has prospered. But when the American economy sours and the output of its Moscow as the nation’s commanding brain, the Heartland was “made” by the Volga, factories sputters, many GM workers find themselves unemployed. In 1991, when the muscular working river which is the country’s backbone. the deficit of the federal government exceeded $350 billion, General Motors posted a loss of $3.5 billion, a mammoth amount for a private corporation. Just as the health For Russians, the Volga has always been much more than just a river. Its popular image of a body is related to the strength and consistency of the beating of the heart, so the was well captured by the philosopher Rozanov: “a lot of what is sacred and something economic and cultural health of the United States has been reflected in the prosperity industrial.” The river’s unique life-nurturing and nation-building role is comparable to and degeneration of the Heartland of America. that of the Nile for Egypt. For a landlocked country, the Volga was the great internal sea, which opened wide horizons to the mind and many opportunities to enterprising Commonly identified as part of the “Middle West,” the region may also be called souls. Little wonder that the river is venerated in folk culture as “Mother Volga,” the “MidAmerica.” “Middle” is in many ways the key word describing the region. The benefactor who breast-fed early Russian trade and industry, and it was on the shores middle-sized town served as the formative environment of the midwestern personality, of the Volga that Muscovy made a decisive step to become Rossiya, the world’s largest and popular and literary images of American “Middletowns” have their prototypes in state. such places as Muncie and Kokomo, Indiana. The Midwest invented skyscrapers and is dominated by major metropolises today, but many of its cities have been described Actually you can read the whole history of Russia in its shifting centers of gravity from as lacking the cosmopolitan vigor of cities in the Core. Large corporations dominate one river basin to another. Early on and before the Muscovite period, ancient “Rus” the modern Midwestern industrial economy, but it also remains a region of healthy clung cautiously to the North’s waterway which linked Viking and Byzantine lands, an medium-sized farms. Henry Ford, J.D. Rockefeller, and other prominent industrialists imitative society out on the periphery of Europe. But with a bold step into the basins 5 6 of the Oka and Upper Volga rivers, Muscovy (the Core) truly emerged and Russia who hailed from the region started out on farms and in small-town shops. Recent almost severed its umbilical chord to Europe. Finally, the conquests of the Middle and history shows the vulnerability of the corporate behemoths they established, but the Lower Volga from the 16th through late 19th centuries created a springboard for the family businesses likely would not have grown to such prominence had it not been for impressive Russian thrust to the East that followed. Within a hundred years Russians the economies of scale that could be achieved in this pivotal location. jumped from the Volga shores all the way to the Pacific, and what had been the small It was in the Heartland that America really arrived as a mature world of its own rather core of Muscovy became the Russian Empire. It was here in the Heartland that Russia than a European transplant clinging gingerly to the Atlantic seaboard. In the minds of first emerged as an uneasy synthesis of European and Asian, Christian and Islamic many people in other parts of the world, things American are Midwestern. Cultural worlds. The Heartland, with its largely non-Slavic population, became the model geographer Raymond Gastil commented, “It is a commercially minded area because Russian melting pot. of its New England heritage, yet ruggedly individualistic as a heritage from the Upper Industrial growth in the 20th century only strengthened the region’s role as Russia’s South. It is here that the rationalism of nineteenth-century Yankees fused with the strategic and geopolitical heart. During the Second World War the importance of the familism and folk beliefs of central Pennsylvania and the Upper South to produce a Heartland was recognized both by the Nazis, who saw control of the Volga as the key new industrial folk ideology. The American cult of the average, which in fact gives the to victory, and the Soviets who chose Samara (Kuibyshev) as a reserve capital in case average man a good deal, owes much to the Middle West. In this region reform has Moscow fell. generally been a middle-class rather than upper- or lower-class concern. This naturally follows, for the middle class rules.” The Heartland has historically served and largely Swift Rapids and Quiet Eddies of Povolzhye remains as the backbone of America the citadel of its values and economic might.

The traditional title for this region in Russian is Povolzhye, literally “along the Volga”, In the Shadow of Smokestacks and its shape does indeed suggest the line and flow of the river itself. The major cities of the Volga, all with populations now ranging up to 1.5 million, were vital to the The American Heartland is first and foremost a set of industrial cities. The major urban industrial expansion of the 1930s-1960s that solidified the character of Povolzhye as corridor running from Buffalo, Cleveland, and Toledo along Lake Erie to Milwaukee the industrial Heartland. Old cities which were once Russian fortresses, such as Kazan, and Chicago on Lake Michigan lines the Great Lakes, the unsurpassable natural artery Simbirsk (Ul’yanovsk), Samara, Saratov, and Nizhnii Novgorod (Gorky), acquired of commerce. Many smaller aging industrial cities speak of the former importance of industrial satellites on the opposite bank of the river. Thus, a string of dual cities was local resources. created and the region’s urban corridor functioned much like the main channel of the Geographers traditionally have seen the Heartland as the western part of the “American powerful Volga. Manufacturing Belt.” The Belt is not limited to the U.S. though. Across the transparent border, southern Ontario is a spillover of the same industrial Heartland, replete with 7 8 But the Heartland is also a place of quiet backwaters in its outer boundaries. These subsidiary plants of many U.S. corporations, while Toronto is regarded as a twin of rural hinterlands have largely non-Slavic people which creates the melting pot image Chicago, one of the most representative American cities. Most of the remainder of the of the region. What links them to the main channel are urban centers located on the Manufacturing Belt falls within the Core, but only in a small stretch of upstate New tributaries of the Volga, possessing the same diversified manufacturing base as the larger York do the Core and Heartland abut against each other. Though the corridor south of cities. These linking cities are themselves largely Russian and belong to the region’s Lake Erie links the Atlantic Coast and the interior areas, the cities at each end of it look main urban rapids. For example, heavily industrialized Izhevsk also serves as the capital in opposite directions both literally and figuratively. Buffalo may be within the same of the nominally non-Slavic Udmurtian republic, and Ufa, a major petrochemical state as New York City, but the latter faces across the Atlantic and considers itself the center and million-plus city, is the capital of Bashkortostan. Several smaller centers on senior sibling in a family of ports that includes Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston, the Volga (Cheboksary, Ioshkar-Ola and Saransk) are the capitals of other autonomous while Buffalo faces west and sees its problems and potentials mirrored in cities like republics of the non-Russian peoples of the Middle Volga area. The compact blocks of Cleveland and Detroit. Finance, trade, and other forms of commercial activity may be native populations appear on the map to be facing away from major river corridors, cut more common in the cities of the Core, but Heartland metropolises have throbbed to off by nearly uninterrupted currents of Russian predominance. On all four sides the industrial rhythms. The Heartland’s boundary from the west is that line beyond which middle-Volga variety of native people is encircled by purely Russian territories, and this the smokestacks and storage tanks of Heartland factories cast deep shadows over nearby ethnic divide helps to draw the boundaries of the diverse region. The area north of the fields, and agriculture takes a backseat to industrial enterprises. latitudinal stretch of Volga and Kama with its forests and Finno-Ugric speaking native In other directions, the boundaries of the region are the product of natural forces that Mary and Udmurt people strongly resembles the North. South of that line, fertile soils led other areas to be less conducive to industry. As you head south toward the Ohio dominate, and the native people speak Turkic languages (with the exception of the River, you move away from the areas of recent continental glaciation which scooped Mordvinians). With such a diverse ethnic and economic landscape, it is no surprise that out the Great Lakes into more rough terrain. To the north, denser forest cover and it takes a river like the Volga, the Heartland’s great inland waterway and backbone, to thinner soils that reflect harsher climatic conditions and more frequent glacial erosion hold the region together. inhibit development. Thus the Heartland is surrounded by areas of greater natural wealth in terms of forests, minerals, and soils, but the costs of moving goods, or processing them in the more rugged terrain are higher. The Heartland has always relied on the relative ease with which it could establish and maintain superior transportation networks, and its central location among diverse neighbors to draw in raw materials for processing in its factories. As a result, the magnitude of the circulation of people and goods has been one of its most distinctive characteristics.

9 10 THEME 1: RUSSIA’S MAIN STREET THEME 1: MAIN STREET U.S.A. There is a kind of dryness about the Even before the arrival of Slavic populations, the Volga region enjoyed unique The story of the transport supremacy of the Heartland began with opening of the Under the rolling clouds of the prairie a moving mass of steel. An land along the quiet reaches of the Volga advantages of location that helped it become a Main Street through the Eurasian famous “gangplank” route West from the Core along lake Erie. This route followed between Samara and Saratov. The irritable clank and rattle beneath a Volga-the ancient waterway of Russia- continent. What was to be Russia’s Heartland long ago was also the focus for navigable streams and relatively flat terrain, but its value was not fully realized until prolonged roar. The sharp scent flows among great plains, among solitudes commerce and kingdoms of many diverse peoples. Just as trade along the Dnieper 1825, when the state of New York completed work on the Erie Canal, the “Big Ditch” of oranges cutting the soggy smell and wildernesses. In July the grass of the created the early Slav state of Kievan Rus, so commerce that linked Europe with the that extended for more than 360 miles. Although boats were pulled along the canal of unbathed people and ancient hills dried up, the smell of wormwood is Islamic Orient via the Volga created a cradle where many states were formed along the by horses, shipping times from Buffalo to New York City were reduced from twenty baggage. Towns as planless as a scattering of pasteboard boxes on everywhere, flint gleams in the moonlight; great river. By the 10th century both areas had adopted the religion of the southern to eight days, and freight costs dropped to five percent of their previous levels. West the traveler's feet become dusty and sore; an attic floor...It is September, hot, the leaves of oaks and maples are stiff, ends of their trade routes: Christianity on the Dnieper and Islam on the Volga. of the Appalachians, the natural features favored westward movement. The chain of very dusty...Here-she meditated- Great Lakes to the north and the Ohio River and its tributaries to the south were both is the newest empire of the world; as if made of tin, and it takes more than The first Volga state was formed by a branch of the same people who gave their name a man's strength to split a pine; only the oriented along the westward axes of expansion. Using these routes to gain access to the Northern Middlewest; a land to modern Bulgaria. These Volga Bulgars traded with Central Asia by way of Astrakhan Tatar maple stands unperturbed; there the Mississippi River, people could move along tributaries that flowed across the Great of dairy herds and exquisite lakes, and across the Caspian Sea or by caravan routes. After the Mongol invasions of the of new automobiles and tar-paper are no flowers, and the bonfires on the Plains. More than two-thirds of the continent’s width thereby could be spanned, and hills..are visible from the Volga for many early Middle Ages swept through, the Kazan Khanate (a kingdom governed by a “khan” shanties and silos like red towers, within 30 years, American expansion rolled on to the Pacific. The Heartland’s early versts through the dust clouds rolling up or leader) inherited this trade. The Volga (or Kazan) Tatars are thus descendants of the of clumsy speech and hope that is transportation routes therefore made it an empire-builder, a crucially important region boundless. from Astrakhan. ancient Bulgars and other local tribes, but with a strong Mongol element. This complex that served as springboard for the major thrust of frontier movement. ~Boris Pilnyak, "Mother Earth", in genesis is mirrored in the confusion surrounding the very name “Tatars.” The Mongols ~Sinclair Lewis, Main Street, Mother Earth and Other Stories, transl used “Tatar” as a pejorative term for all conquered people, but gradually as the never Leaders in the rapidly settling states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois saw great NY, 1920 by Vera T. Reck and Michael Green, numerous Mongols were dissolved among the conquered masses, they came to be called opportunities for building canals between the streams draining into the Great Lakes Anchor Books, Doubleday, Garden Tatars themselves. For Russians, the name “Tatar” became synonymous with “Mongol.” and tributaries of the Ohio River. But despite the improvements the canals provided, City, 1968, p. 3 This original mistake has fed early and persistent Russian biases against Tatars, they quickly fell into disuse when railroads arrived in the region and provided even manifested in the saying “An uncalled-for guest is worse than a Tatar.” But in reality broader, better, and cheaper service. By 1870 the Heartland had the nation’s densest rail the Volga Tatars were vastly different from the fierce nomadic Mongols. In the words network. Freight costs fell dramatically, and shipments reached eastern ports in three of Rozanov, “Since long ago, Asia and in particular Islamic Asia created here a home days or less. Detroit’s pivotal location along the waterways connecting Lake Huron and not for nomadic hordes, but for civilization; for long trading and industrial people, the Lake Erie epitomized the locational advantages of waterway-based centers, but Chicago Bulgars established a foothold here; even before the times when Russian Slavs started took greatest advantage of the railroad. Using land grants and investment schemes, building the first Christian churches along the Oka and did not even dream about Chicago made itself the terminus of more than a dozen lines. For nearly a century, most claiming the region for European civilization, Bulgarians listened to the teaching of rail shipments passing through the north central U.S. were transferred from one line to 11 12 Qu’ran on the shores of the Volga and Kama.” Thus never barbarian, the early Heartland became the scene of rivalry between two another in a Chicago railyard, and many manufacturing, handling, and storage matched and intermingling rivals, as the Russian and Tatar states met and established facilities were established on nearby tracts to take advantages of this trade. In late 19th emissary cities along their mutual Main Street. The Kasimov Khanate on the Oka century, the combination of a dense railroad network and the region’s proximity to River served as a waiting station for Moscow-backed claimants to the Kazan kingdom. waterways that were well suited to the transport of heavy bulk materials enabled it to In turn, the Russian city of Nizhni Novgorod was founded on the Volga in the 13th become the center for new kinds of industries. The coal and mineral wealth of the Old century to spearhead downstream colonization movement and has been the connecting Mountains and Crossroads fueled blast furnaces, while iron ore was easily floated from hinge between the Core and Heartland ever since. the Mesabi and other ranges of the North. First canals and then railroads also greatly expanded the area within which farm products could be sold at reasonable prices. In the 16th century, with the formal annexation of Kazan (which had been Russia’s Agricultural products started flowing to Heartland processing plants, reappearing as dependency for much of its brief history) and Astrakhan at the Caspian end, Russian breakfast cereals, sausages, cooking oil, and hundreds of other products. This spurred merchants inherited their trade routes to the Orient. Commerce was long limited, development of the nation’s first commercially oriented farm system based on the however, to luxury items because of primitive transport technology. Flat-bottomed diversified production of small farmers. In the Heartland there evolved the commercial boats were pulled upstream by teams of the so-called burlaks, the famed Volga boatmen agricultural complex that soon flooded all of the U.S. or barge-haulers, and the journey could take months. Economic growth on the Volga was greatly spurred only with the wide introduction of steamboats in the 1850s, when The Heartland’s industrial boom created a peculiar “mercantile” element of regional the Volga truly became the Main Street of the country at last. The eastward shift of culture. Because industrial success in the Middle West generally resulted from real Russia’s population helped propel the changes. By the early 19th century, Russia’s productive achievement rather than speculation, no moral stigma was associated population east of the Volga had caught up with that to the west, and the Heartland with wealth. Those who accumulated money commanded additional respect when could enjoy a pivotal location in the emerging all-Russian market. Grain from the that money was used for public benefit. Philanthropists like Rockefeller and Andrew Breadbasket and salt from Kazakh saltpans were carried upstream, later supplemented Carnegie endowed numerous projects that gave them popular prestige unknown to by far more important cotton from Central Asia, coal from Donetzk basin and oil aristocrats and other rich people elsewhere. Middle Western attitudes toward material from the Caucasus. Downstream, the main commodities were northern lumber and success were reflected in other cultural traits like pecuniarism, the measurement of a industrial products from the Core. Trade thrived in those prime locations where the person’s standing based on income; functionalism, which placed great emphasis on how Volga made sharp bends and several overland routes converged. Thus, Kazan is located “useful” people and things were; and conspicuous consumption. Salesmanship near the point of confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers. Samara prospered on the became the hallmark of the Midwesterner, and in the Heartland more than in any other famous loop of the Volga where it flows around the so-called Zhiguli mountains. region success in business was regarded as a proper purpose in life. Midwesterners also came to be strong believers in technology, as industrial know-how was often the key to prosperity. The region became known for its technological competence and its many 13 14 The advent of railroads strengthened, rather than undermined, the competitive innovators. In part, early development of steam-powered devices was encouraged by the advantage of the Volga emporiums. Since the formidable width of the majestic flatness of the terrain, which ruled out extensive use of waterwheels. Volga severely limited the number of bridges, a few large cities became the major The relatively flat topography also permitted the ready adoption of automobiles in the transshipment points where industrial processing developed. Particularly representative 20th Century. Motor vehicles required smooth, dependable roads, and as had been of the flurry of commercial activity in Volga cities was Nizhnii Novgorod, long the true with the expansion of railroads, the Heartland led the way in the provision of home to Russia’s largest annual trading fair. With its huge turnover and national improved roads. When the burgeoning number of cars quickly overwhelmed old two- scope, the fair was crucial to the evolution of the all-Russian market (it was there that lane highways, the region’s engineers responded by constructing “dual highways” with the gold ruble’s exchange rate was determined). Nizhnii Novgorod also developed as limited points of access, the forerunners of modern freeways. Among the earliest were Russia’s major early free labor market, beginning with the annual congregation of huge the tollroads leading from Chicago across northern Indiana and Ohio. By 1947, Ohio, numbers of people who were needed as burlaks. According to estimates in the 18th Illinois, and Michigan were among the nation’s leaders in terms of miles of multi-lane century there were as many as four-hundred thousand burlaks hauling barges on the highways. As the nation’s network of freeways expanded to provide all parts of the U.S. Volga. Recruited among the restless “drifter types” attracted by the freedom of life on with high-speed roadways and as airports were improved to provide all major cities with the river and strongly organized into collectively bargaining teams (artels), the fearless ready access to air service, the transportation supremacy of the Heartland somewhat and loud-mouthed burlaks and hands in the Volga’s ports became Russia’s first true diminished. Nevertheless, for nearly 50 years, the nation’s busiest airport has been proletarians. One of them, Maxim Gorky (a penname meaning “bitter”), for whom in Chicago and more recently, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Cleveland emerged as major Nizhni Novgorod was renamed in the Soviet period, came from the very bottom of airline hubs. Russian society. For nearly two centuries, the Heartland has been the region through which a vast After years of vagabond drifting up and down the river and intense self-education, share of the nation’s movement has been channelled. Walter Havinghurst saw this land Gorky emerged as an immensely successful realist writer. His characters were self-made without barriers as an avenue through which restless people moved on to new frontiers industrialists and steamship owners, heirs to the great Volga merchant families who beyond the Mississippi. To cross the country you still must cross the Heartland. also climbed from the lower rungs of the social ladder. These were the people who combined business grip with civic spirit and deep religiosity with patronage of the arts, who pursued material success but also felt a very Russian guilt about their wealth. Such contradictory pulls are typical of the Russian character, but only on the Volga could they peacefully coexist within “balanced” single personalities. On the whole, the Heartland seems the only Russian region where there was no stigma attached to “new” (as opposed to inherited, land-based) wealth. 15 16 Large-scale transport projects undertaken between the 1930s and the 1950s improved The Foundry Turned Rustbelt the Heartland’s position as a transport hub. Three canals, the Volga-Baltic, Volga-Don, The long-established link between the Heartland’s transport role and its economic and Volga-Moscow, finally created the unified system of waterways for all of European profile was only strengthened with the 20th century arrival of the automobile industry. Russia conceived so many years earlier. Even if these improvements arrived when Building on earlier successes in wagon and carriage production, the Detroit area the role of river transport was increasingly taken over by railroads, automobiles, and emerged as a production center for motor vehicles in the first decades of the century. pipelines, the region’s transport supremacy persisted. All major oil and gas pipelines Henry Ford ensured his company leadership in the nascent industry by using mass- from Siberia still cross this ancient Main Street on the way west to domestic and foreign production techniques to rapidly assemble large numbers of inexpensive yet dependable consumers. cars. As Detroit’s two largest firms, General Motors and Ford, rapidly expanded, the Marketplace Turned Workshop Heartland became the preeminent motor vehicle manufacturing center in the world. The two giant companies sped the establishment of related industrial operations The industrial ascendancy of the Heartland started modestly with lumber and flour throughout the Heartland as they strove to control nearly all aspects from iron mining mills at transshipment points, but the energetic drive of the Volga merchants soon and steel production to the transportation of finished cars to dealers. The explosive assured it a prominent place in technical innovation and industrial growth. It was on growth of automobile sales throughout the first half of the century sent repeated waves the Volga that oil was used in railway and ship engines for the first time in the world, of automobile-related manufacturing expansion across the Heartland. Such industries or the first Russian mechanized lumberyards appeared. From modest beginnings in as rubber in Akron and glass in Toledo provided products used by other industries, and ship repair, Sormovo works in Nizhnii Novgorod grew into Russia’s major general manufacturing diversified in the region. engineering manufacturer, ship-builder, and car-maker. But the real development By 1950 almost one third of the value added in U.S. manufacturing came from the spurt arrived during the Soviet industrial revolution. With the general shift of Soviet Heartland. But by 1986, that share dropped to less than one quarter, as many relative industry to the east, the Heartland found itself midway to Siberian mineral resources. advantages of the Heartland faded. To a great extent, Heartland industries fell victim During the Second World War large-scale oil production began in the Tatar and to their earlier successes. Many of the massive investments in facilities and equipment Bashkir republics, and before the later oil bonanza in West Siberia, the Heartland was made in earlier decades became obsolete. Many industries also seemed to lose the the nation’s leading producer, accounting for 60 percent of oil output. Nowadays the determination that fueled their earlier ascendancy. Both Ford and General Motors, share of the region has dwindled to 20 percent, but its leadership has already been which had pioneered automobile manufacturing, were known for their conservatism by firmly established in petrochemical and chemical industries. Location of other heavy the 1970s, and only when foreign autobuilders severely eroded their markets did they industries was promoted by the attraction of abundant water and cheap electricity from respond with new designs and operating procedures. The assembly lines constructed the large hydroelectric stations on the Volga. during World War II were becoming obsolete, and the skilled labor forces of Heartland

cities became increasingly expensive and superfluous as many operations were 17 18 As if oil alone were not enough, other transport-related industry was drawn into the automated and as new factories were built in places where labor costs were far lower. region, continuing the symbolic link between the Heartland’s main street role and its The massive blast furnaces that symbolized the power of the steel industry became industrial profile. The Heartland is the dominant automobile-manufacturer in Russia. obsolete as new technologies reduced the demand for heavier metals or offered new, The three biggest automobile producers in the country formed “auto triangle” within smaller scale ways of producing them. Between 1977 and 1986, the number of the region. Its three apexes were in Naberezhnie Chelny (where the KAMAZ truck industrial jobs in the region declined by nearly 20 percent. The precipitous drop in factory is located), Togliatty (the VAZ factory mass-produced the Soviet “people’s car” manufacturing left the Manufacturing Belt reeling, inspiring the new and somewhat -Zhiguli) and in Nizhnii Novgorod (GAZ factory turned out cars and trucks). KAMAZ pejorative name “Rustbelt” for the region. and VAZ were conceived on a grand scale as breakthrough projects in the Soviet Still, even as smokestacks retreat into memories, industrial decline is countered attempt to overcome the backwardness of the auto industry, and they are the worlds somewhat by the construction of new plants in new Heartland locations where the two largest individual auto factories. Togliatty and Naberezhnie Chelny may well be most advanced technology reestablishes the region’s competitiveness. While no longer the world’s largest company towns as well, both growing from scratch in the 1960s to the dominant industrial concentration within the United States, the Heartland remains exceed a half-million by 1990. In the smaller towns, these automobile giants spawned an area where diversified manufacturing operates at scales evident in few other places a whole panoply of supporting industries turning out anything from car electronics to on the globe. tires to draperies. Faithful to its romance with the transport industry, the Heartland is also the major focus of the nation’s civil and military aviation industry. THEME 2: THE ETHNIC SALAD BOWL In the turbulent world of post-Soviet ethnic resurgence, control of the major industrial The region was not only a crucible of American industrialism, but also a melting pot and transport assets of the Heartland has become a trump card in the hands of for the evolving mainstream culture. The roots of the region’s remarkable population new nationalist movements. Tatarstan alone is in a position to block the supplies of diversity were established quite early, soon after American independence, when a series practically all Russian oil and natural gas, and to cut the trans-Siberian and Volga of forced Native American land cessions were converted into the sale of individual routes. Such threats are a sharp reminder that the great river of Russia is not so Russian tracts to new settlers. Eager migrants converged on these easily cultivable flat lands after all, but the melting pot of many nationalities. from all directions. Immigrants from New England and New York who used the Erie route generally flocked to the northern parts of the Heartland. Those coming from THEME 2: THE ETHNIC SALAD BOWL Pennsylvania and states farther south traversed the mountain passes that conveyed Intense economic metabolism aside, the Heartland’s pivotal location also set in motion them into the Ohio River system along the Heartland’s southern margin. The arrival of some intricate ethnic chemistry. An insight into its peculiarly Russian “melting pot” many southerners helped create a representative cross-section of “old stock” Americans. is provided by the history of the Tatars, who experienced a longer period and greater The linguistic blending of these diverse people produced a dialect that many believe degree of Russian political control, cultural influence and modernization than any provides the norm of standard American speech. 19 20 other Islamic people in Russia, and yet appear today to be far from Russified, possessing As diverse elements mixed in the homogenizing environment of the Heartland, the a thriving ethnic culture and strong nationalism. With 5.5 million people, the Tatars prototypical Middle Western character was formed, of which Alan Parker asked, “Is are the Russian federation’s largest minority. it too fanciful to see in its upper reaches the drives, acuity, shrewdness, and hardness of the Yankee combined with the animal energy, competence and sturdiness of the After the Russian conquest under Tsar Ivan IV, crusading policies were at times harsh German peasant, and among its common people an emotionality, tempered by a but never consistent, and the Islamic population of the Volga was not displaced or sophistication about human suffering, that must have belonged to a people that forced into conversion. The freedoms of Volga Tatars in the Empire were finally grew up among the moral and human ambiguities of southern slavery?” Finally, secured during the enlightened reign of Catherine the Great, who regarded the Pennsylvanian Quakers added to the mix, and their steadfastness and careful behavior Muslims as a civilizing influence on other peoples of the Volga and favored them. were traits which became a hallmark of Midwestern business. The official encouragement of Tatar trade with Kazakh steppes led to the rise of the rich commercial Tatar bourgeoisie in the 19th century. Of the greatest importance in Following the “old stock” population were Italian, Irish, and East European transforming Tatars into a modern nation were Russian policies that strongly favored immigrants, who arrived in the Heartland in greater numbers than in either the North education in the native Tatar language (rather than in traditional Arabic). The first or the South. This new wave first appeared in the latter decades of the 1800s, when printing press publishing religious books in the Arabic script was opened in Kazan new opportunities increasingly concentrated in the region’s cities. The industrial jobs by the Russian government as early as 1802 (the second Arabic press in the Islamic seen as less desirable by already established Americans were filled willingly by newer world). Turning out thousands of titles, the printing press effectively countered any immigrants. It was during this time that Chicago earned its reputation as the second proselytizing attempted by the same government. By the late 19th century, new Tatar most populous Polish city in the world, and Cleveland’s West Side became an amalgam schools appeared which focused on teaching the Arabic alphabet in a way suited to of eastern European nationalities as complex and diverse as the lands between the Baltic spoken Tatar. This helped Tatar to emerge as a literary language, and a veritable mania and Adriatic seas. As industrial development continued, employment opportunities of Tatar book publishing followed, creating new bonds of culture and language. in Heartland cities attracted Americans from the south. Many blacks forsook the economic bonds that left them shackled to the rural south for decades and moved to In the field of tension between the secularizing impact of historically close Russians, Heartland industrial centers, with major movements occurring during both world wars and religious influences from distant Islamic brethen, a religious-secular symbiosis and continuing into the 1960s. was forged, a new strong identity held together by emerging Tatar nationalism. In marked contrast to the conservative Islam propagated from Central Asia, Tatar This mixture of peoples seemingly made the Heartland the nation’s preeminent melting reformers advocated more flexible Islam tuned to modern challenges. Armed with their pot. However, the coalescence of significant numbers of so many types of people from cosmopolitan “Eurasian” culture, Kazan Tatars came to fulfill the role of mediators so many different places was highly uneven. Groups more similar to the white, English- between Russians and the peripheral Islamic peoples of the Empire, and helped spread speaking, economically successful citizens that came to symbolize American culture Russian influence deeper into Asia. At least until the 1920s, they remained the tended to assimilate themselves into that culture, readily discarding their old practices 21 22 undisputed leaders of cultural and political life of Russia’s Muslims. Even today, a large in order to conform to the norm. People who were more distinctively different segment of the educated urban elites in Central Asia and Kazakhstan are Tatars, and because of their skin colors, accents, or ways of life were less likely to be accepted, Tatar communities are dispersed all across Russia. however, and discriminatory practices and sometimes violence accompanied their settlement in the region. More so than in any other part of the nation, wealthier and Among other Volga peoples, Islam and Tatar influence fully prevailed among the middle-class residents of Heartland cities responded to growing diversity throughrigid Bashkirs, while Russian influence proved stronger among the Mary, Udmurt, Mordvin spatial segregation of communities. In record numbers they moved to suburban and Chuvash peoples, who by the 18th century were Christian and had largely adopted locations where houses and lawns were larger, schools were funded amply to provide Russian ways. Even in facial features it is hard to tell Russians from native Volga better education, and fewer people who were different were encountered. Countless peoples, since both are products of an ethnic cocktail. Names and facial features of old neighborhoods were allowed to deteriorate, turning many locales into readily many local Russians lend credence to the proverb “scrape a Russian and you’ll find a recognizable symbols of inner city decay and racial tension. Heartland commentators Tatar.” Lenin, who was born in Simbirsk, is a good example: his father was Chuvash, once pointed with pride to the emergence of a hybrid American culture created in the while his mother was German, and the leader of the Russian revolution hardly looked “melting pot,” believing that the best characteristics of those groups blended together a Slav at all. Today the native inhabitants of the Heartland are barely distinguishable in a distinctive new entity. As the end of the 20th Century approached, however, from Russians in levels of education or social mobility. They participated in the observers seeking to cast reality in the best possible light came to talk of a demographic Slav colonization movement to previously vacant tracts in the region, furthering an “salad bowl” within which different people maintained their own distinct identities incredibly complicated pattern of interspersed settlement of various ethnic groups. while working together. The Russian attempt to carve autonomous territories from this crazy patchwork of ethnic groups was but high-minded idealism. Thus only a third of all Russia’s Tatars live In addition to being the place where a composite American identity was being forged, in Tatarstan, while in Bashkortostan, Tatars actually outnumber Bashkirs. however incompletely, the Heartland was instrumental in working out quite a few valuable elements of the American cultural heritage. Although the region acquired For all the impact of a mostly Russian population and considerable modernization, the wealth rapidly, and life focused on economic enterprise, its social character did not Volga peoples are far from dissolved in the Russian sea. Throughout the Soviet period degenerate into the individualistic pursuit of profit at any price. The foundations that the proportion of native groups in the Heartland remained nearly unchanged. While preserved the essential liberalism of that society were education and justice. The respect most residents are bilingual, full linguistic assimilation into Russian is very limited and for practical education was deeply imprinted in the psyche of major groups that settled not growing. In four hundred years of Russian control, native groups were changed but the region, especially the Puritans and Quakers. Since the mid-1800s, a proliferation not annihilated or assimilated, as often the case in western nations. In the Heartland’s of land grant universities set high educational standards and produced armies of “bowl” the ethnic salad is still very fresh. skilled public servants. Southern individualism was balanced by the Puritan belief that freedom in society includes the willing acceptance of an orderly discipline. 23 24 The Volga has not become a Russian river in the narrow ethnic sense, but more in a This freedom was derived and also curbed by laws, which emerged as a real foundation spiritual sense, the unifier of Rossiya and its culture which transcends narrow ethnic of American society. limits. Even though the Heartland opened the history of Russian expansionism, it is Building on the earlier frontier spirit of mutual aid, the region helped shape a very far more representative of the expansiveness of the Russian character, of its ability to American answer to the dilemma of how to reconcile individual rights with collective adapt to other cultures and to peacefully coexist with them. Among the people of responsibilities. Alan Parker thought that this response was best illustrated by the the Volga, the eternal contradictions of the Russian soul were tempered by traditions phenomenon of individualistic friendliness. Individualistic in their businesses, of learning and pragmatism. The educational feats of the Tatars reflect the belief of Midwesterners “were generous to neighbors and combined readily in community Volga eoples in practical learning as a vehicle for individual achievement. It was in projects. Clubs, churches, circles, lodges, societies flourished in the Midwest soil the the Heartland that the first Russian provincial university was opened in 1804, and it more so because their members felt themselves to be free and equal individuals. And enjoyed far wider than provincial fame, especially in sciences. Quite in contrast to the certainly there were some who found in such association the means to respect and refined intellectuals of the capitals, the Volga peoples were distrustful of education for status that seemed so hard to achieve in a near-egalitarian society.” The blunt character education’s sake. These were self-made practical people, whose careers were due not to of intellectual and political life in the Middle West was the reverse side of this venerable aristocratic privilege, but to abilities. The most action-oriented (and successful) of all egalitarianism. Seeing themselves as pragmatic doers, Heartland residents often have Russian social democrats, Vladimir Lenin, obtained at Kazan university the practical taken what they like to think is a no-nonsense, business-like attitude to the world. profession of a lawyer. Another lawyer who came from Simbirsk was Kerensky - the Such an approach often has appeared to others as overly simplistic. The region’s political prime minister of Russia’s short-lived democratic republic in 1917. And appropriately culture is strongly job-oriented, in contrast with more liberal, issue-oriented politics in enough, Lenin’s and Kerensky’s fathers were both educators. Spirituality and the North, or the Core. pragmatism, Lenin and Kerensky, solid merchants and unruly burlaks - many mutually opposite Russian traits and types were fostered by and peacefully coexisted on the If Midwestern beliefs and values are not universally accepted in the United States today, Volga. The river had room for both individualism and collectivism, provoking in such they remain close to the image that many people in other nations have of America thinkers as Rozanov a purely Russian answer to universal dilemma of individual vs as a whole. This foreign association may result from the fact that in the period when collective - the notion of sobornost’ (togetherness), where balance is reached on a moral America was rising spectacularly to world dominance, the Midwest was America. The basis. region largely embodies the great period of industrial revolution, booming growth, swelling immigration, and socio-economic change roughly from the Civil War through In the words of Rozanov, the Volga “...moved everything ahead, moved somehow the 1930s. Those were self-confident times when fortunes accumulated with regularity, nobly, without imperiousness or coercion.” The Heartland is indeed the embodiment and the values of capitalism and American democracy were hardly ever questioned. of Russia “on the move.” The heyday of the region was in the great period of economic Not coincidentally, the period was an era of Republican Party dominance. Over a 44- change and cultural florescence in Russia, roughly between 1861 and 1917, the year period from 1869 to 1913, six of nine U.S. presidents hailed from Ohio, and one 25 26 times of fast-growing and self-confident capitalistic Russia. Will the region, long of the other three came from the Heartland portion of upstate New York. As the overshadowed by Moscow’s omnipotence, regain its prominence in the new times relative economic stature of the region has slipped in recent years, however, so has its of change? It may be too early to tell, but Nizhnii Novgorod’s leadership in market- political prominence. Since 1930, the only Heartland residents to fill one of the nation’s oriented economic reforms may be a harbinger of the region’s revival as Russia’s inner top two positions were Gerald Ford and Dan Quayle. heart.

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THE CROSSROADS THE CROSSROADS Raymond Krishchyunas Stanley D. Brunn

Linking up Russia’s railways with those of Europe at Brest is not an easy The waters of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers near Cairo, Illinois do not task, perhaps because the track widths do not match. Train delays are blend smoothly. To a towboat captain pushing a tightly strapped barge caused by the change from the European railway gauge to the wider up river, the Mississippi’s thicker brown waters become distinct from the Russian one, a choice made in the 1840s in a conscious attempt to prevent thinner and creamier Ohio, supporting writer Jonathon Raban’s observation the possibility of western attack by railway. The history of the region that the mixing of the waters from the two rivers was “a confluence of thick suggests that the precaution was far from paranoid. But even in peacetime, machine oil and rosewater....so different that it was hard to believe they the bustling railway station in Brest has always been the major entry point could fuse into a single element without curdling.” At the junction itself, the into Russia from the West. Around the battered trains bound for Warsaw tow will head one way or the other, but this is only the first of many channel or Minsk swarm crowds of luggage laden characters, whose clandestine choices the pilot will make. Within a few hundred miles, more channels border trade activity bears witness to close links between Poland and appear as the Missouri and Illinois flow into the Mississippi, while a shorter Belarus. There also are elegant trains of uncrowded sleeping cars, bound reach along the Ohio would encounter the Tennessee, Cumberland, and for Paris or Berlin. For their passengers, Brest with its unnerving delays and Wabash. In fact, decisions made along this stretch of streams could even Belarus itself is but a nuisance on the trunk road between Russia and ultimately lead boaters in all compass directions because at this mid- the West. A short ride from the station is one of the major symbols of Soviet continent meeting point, north meets south and east grades into west. But resistance to Germany in the Second World War the famous border fortress the crossroads where the waters mix in an uneasy union is a truly a place of of Brest which was besieged and defended to the last man under German transition, and the primary bonds of the people here are to regions on the attack in 1941. This defense earned Brest the distinction of being called outside. the premier Hero city, but also left it fully destroyed. Aside from the gloomy ruins of the fortress and the frenzy of the station, it was the ultimate Soviet city of standardized apartment blocks that could have been anywhere in the USSR. 1 2 s s A R u -~.. . •Rzhev <. IN DIA N A \ Velikiye Luki • Moscow. t ' / l iTT Lt • ' a "-VUII,vtlle ~C, '-, j Vyazm G~ sL\J~ • •Kaluga Lexington \ K E N T U C K y '--. Bowling • _ _ Minsk• L.-... . G re~~ - '-, ' ..r-·---·/' A R U S s B E L NASH VILLE "' B A SIN

POLES ' YE ...... __ .. """\ '• ·.-,__ ...--··-.. / \.,.- l(ovel' • N E u I( R 3 4 - BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE WEST BETWEEN NORTH AND SOUTH Some atlases have a two-page spread of Europe out to the Urals, and there is one The Crossroads of the United States pops up all over the place in an atlas: smaller section of the map that usually ends up in the page binding. Perhaps this fact is sectional maps may have portions of it variously in the Northeast or the Central region symbollic of the mixed identity of the Crossroads: its history, political boundaries, and or the Southeast. Because it is a region which is everywhere and nowhere at once, it exchanges of dominant ethnicities all bear witness to a place with a turbulent location. has a poor identity for many Americans. Sometimes, the area has been called “The The story of the Crossroads is that of Russia’s borderland, for centuries caught in a Border South,” presenting the image of a transition zone, particularly during the Civil devastating tug of war between Russia and the West. With fortunes of the contending War when it was torn between the Union and Confederacy. Culturally, the region is sides shifting many times, their overlapping imprints created a region where the definitely more southern than northern. On the other hand, its economic orientation transition from Russia to Belarus to Poland is nearly imperceptible, a violent playing is North, not South. Agricultural and industrial economies in southern Illinois, field facilitated by a lack of physical barriers to movement. Indiana, and Ohio as well as central Kentucky are tied strongly to urban centers in the Northeast. Yet to say this region is merely a transition zone would do disservice to its The fortress of Brest guards what is in fact a narrow bottleneck opening the easiest road full identity. from Europe into Russia. To the south along the river Pripet’ are formidable marshes and forests, nearly impassable for mass movements of peoples and armies. To the north, Perhaps the Crossroads is just a place of leftovers and “between-ness.” for it does indeed ancient glaciation erected barriers of barren sandy hills covered with dense pine forests borrow from each of the surrounding regions. The Crossroads does not have the far and surrounded with thousands by lakes. Between lies an elevated watershed known as more prosperous economy of the Heartland or the Breadbasket, and the irregularity the Belorussian Ridge that goes all the way from Brest to Smolensk. In this amphibian of its metes and bounds land survey contrasts with flat geometric terrain north of the land of rivers, lakes and marshes, the Ridge offers the only convenient dry route from Ohio river. It is culturally close to the Old Mountains, but is far more densely settled the West into the Core of Russia. Not surprisingly, ever since the first Russo Polish and less marginal economically. Even the Ozarks, which many geographers would conflicts in the 16th century, the Crossroads has been a veritable theater of war, and the regard as an outpost of Appalachia, are far better suited for agriculture, are more axis from Brest to Moscow became the corridor of overland invasions. actively farmed, and enjoy higher educational standards, to say nothing of the recent influx of amenity-seeking transplants (tourists and retirees) from the north. Perhaps While the Crossroads includes portions of western Russia and northern Ukraine, the Crossroads is exactly as the name implies: a transition or “fusion” zone where Belarus takes up much of the region. The heroic role of the Crossroads as first line of transportation lines criss-cross the territory of mid-America - a region smack in the defense against invaders from the West is epitomized by the popular image of Belarus middle, a bridge for the country’s traffic, both literally and culturally. known to all people of the former USSR: that of the indomitable “Partisan Republic” which withstood so much abuse from Hitler’s forces. But geography was no friend to The truth seems to be that the Crossroads is all of these, and yet the sum is much more the Crossroads, and the landscape allowed armies to roll relatively quickly even over than the parts merely added up. If the region is a cultural transition zone and a 5 6 The man they called Ed said In the library the other day I happened Belarus, with resistance growing toward the east. The Crossroads bled various historic geographic “borrower,” it is because its neighbors to the north and south were engaged the muddy Mississippi water was upon a Polish-French atlas of the wholesomer to drink than the clear second half of the eighteenth century, enemies until they were stopped in decisive battles almost at the walls of Moscow. in a back-and-forth interplay of cultures and politics across the region, leaving deep water of the Ohio...And they and...I found my village of Zagora...It In fact, the eastern boundary of the region can be drawn along a line of cities which footprints on the Crossroads landscape. Each imprint of the crazy dance pattern talked about how Ohio water didn't can safely be assumed that the village have seen more than their share of battles over the centuries from Borodino, where of North and South stayed, and somehow, when the dust settled, a distinct region like to mix with Mississippi water. had been there long before the atlas Ed said if you take the Mississippi came out and that the name too came Napoleon lost 50,000 of his troops, to Bryansk, a city vital to the Soviet Army’s return emerged. thrust against Germany in 1943. on a rise when the Ohio is low, from long ago, stubbornly held to...I, The Crossroads straddles the confluence of the country’s three greatest rivers - the you'll find a wide band of clear wa- however, have quite another feeling ter all the way down the east side of when I see this familiar scene superim- Perhaps the place which most epitomizes the cost in human blood of controlling Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri - and in the pre-railroad era this was the natural the Crossroads is Smolensk, Russia’s foremost city of military glory and Moscow’s transportation intersection for the continent’s interior. This water route’s northern the Mississippi for a hundred miles posed on the picture of what it used to or more, and the minute you get out be like-the greyness of thatch, the much gatekeeper from the west. From the early 16th century, the shield belt from Smolensk section is the St.Lawrence waterway opening up into the Great Lakes, while the a quarter mile from shore and pass smaller and incomparably poorer, darker to Chernigov served as Moscow’s military frontier with Poland, and until Russia’s southern channels are the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. The role of the link between the line, it is all thick and yaller the West-Byelorussian village which will decisive victory over Poland in 1667, Smolensk changed hands four times. When Hitler the two is the easy portage between the headwaters of rivers flowing respectively rest of the way across. never again be what it was although it seemed fixed for eternity. invaded in 1941, Smolensk again put up a valiant but futile defense which slowed the into the Great Lakes and the Ohio-Mississippi system. Until 1763 both terminals German advance. The total human loss to the Crossroads region during the Second of this great river arc were controlled by the French, who were firmly established in Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) Life on the Mississippi, NY, 1931, ~ Yanka Bryl, "The Common", in World War was greater than for any other part of Europe: one quarter to one half of Montreal and New Orleans. Realizing early that the region held the key position on "Huck Finn on the Raft" selection Nikolai Atarov, ed., Anthology of the population perished. It took Belarus almost thirty years to bring its census numbers the St. Lawrence-Mississippi axis, the French established trading outposts within the Soviet Short Stories, vol. 2, Progress back to prewar levels, while in the Russian segment of the Crossroads, the population Crossroads as early as 1701-1703. Finally they founded Saint Louis, which was to Publishers, Moscow, 1976, p. 123-124 count has never recovered. eclipse its predecessors as the great midway city, near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri in 1763, the same year that France lost all of its American territory: In a region of such volatile identity, political boundaries have likewise traveled back Quebec to Britain and the Louisiana territory to Spain. and forth in the competition between Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian state. The 13th century had brought disarray to Russia after the Mongol invasion, and the Grand But by that time a new player was emerging in the fight for the interior - the thirteen Principality of Lithuania used this to its advantage, taking over the Slavic lands of the British coastal colonies. The French were spread too thinly across their huge territory Crossroads. Russia did not manage to regain the lands of present day Belarus until and their trade was almost exclusively with the indigenous populations. The coastal 1795. But in 1920 Poland again prevailed over a weakened Russia and occupied the colonies, on the other hand, had built up sufficient demographic pressure to make western part of Belarus (and Ukraine) until 1939. westward colonization relentless once they could bridge the Appalachians. In the early 19th century, the decisive role in the fight for the continental dominance belonged In this land of shifting boundaries, the international border on its western edge is the not to the old French North-South trade axis, but to the East-West axis of American only one of long standing; it first emerged as an internal divide between Poland frontier movement along the Ohio-Missouri line. 7 8 and Lithuania (which included Belarus) as early as the 14th century. A geographer The Wilderness Road through the Cumberland and Pine Mountain gaps and the Ohio’s attempting to draw the boundaries of the Crossroads in other directions may well southern tributaries served as natural access roads for expansion westward, and it was decide it is a “leftover” region, less distinct than its neighbors with more precise also the line of least resistance. The entire territory between the Ohio and Tennessee characteristics. The region includes small portions of adjacent Lithuania, Russia, and rivers had no permanent Native American settlement and was used as neutral hunting Ukraine, all marked by dense forests and peculiar, in-between cultures. The identity ground. As early as 1763, the Proclamation line that elsewhere limited white settlement of these three interfaces is so fuzzy that native residents define themselves simply as to the Atlantic coast and eastern Appalachian slopes traced a sharp inland wedge into “locals,” rather than by any ethnic label. the lands between the Ohio and Cumberland rivers ceded by the Indians. By the 1790s the area roughly corresponding to the Kentucky Bluegrass was the only contiguously A certain “watery” elusiveness of the region’s character seems to mirror its amphibian populated region west of the mountains, and Kentucky (originally part of Virginia) environment. Plenty of rain, a water-retaining forest canopy, and widespread marshes became the first state west of the Appalachians. Mounting pressure by American account for an extremely dense network of rivers and lakes. Spring floods inundate colonists helped Thomas Jefferson persuade France to sell the Louisiana territory large areas and are frequently of catastrophic dimensions. But if rivers endanger life (which it had only just retaken from Spain) to the United States in 1803. Jefferson then in the Crossroads, they also once provided an excellent network of natural roads. The commissioned Lewis and Clark to explore the lands beyond the Mississippi. Saint Louis Belorussian Ridge that forms the spine of the region is the watershed between river soon became the gateway to the western lands they mapped and described. basins that empty into the Baltic, Black, and Caspian seas. Since the watershed is low, the rivers here were easily linked by portages, forming the great interior waterway As population growth and the political call to extend the United States’ control across system. In the times of Kievan Rus’, the region found itself in the very middle of the the continent propelled westward expansion, the Crossroads, once at center stage Varangian-to-Greek waterway that had been so important to the development of the of continental geopolitics, was increasingly bypassed and soon appeared to be little Russian hearth in the North, and the system of portages opened access to Novgorod, more than a borderland between North and South. Yet during the Civil War both the Baltic and Muscovy. In the western direction, the Dnieper’s tributaries nearly sides considered control of the Crossroads crucial. For the Union, the Mississippi, interlock with the tributaries of rivers that penetrate the heartland of Poland. Hence the Cumberland, and Tennessee rivers offered easy corridors into the very heart of the region was the roundabout in the movement of people and trade between all parts of Confederacy. Likewise, the Confederates considered the Ohio to be a vital line of the Slavic realm. defense. Kentucky was torn asunder, its declared neutrality ignored by the invading Union. The region’s internal fragmentation came sharply into focus when Kentucky sent volunteers and recruits to armies of both sides, while Tennessee joined the southern cause only after long hesitation. Remarkably, the Union and Confederate leaders, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, were both born in Kentucky within 50 miles of each other. While the Midwestern states were Northern supporters, their 9 10 THEME 1: THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURES southern sections (included in the Crossroads) had “Copperheads,” who were Southern supporters. The war was a bitter civil one indeed in Kentucky and Tennessee, the two Both blessed and cursed by its “in-between” location, Belarus had little chance to shape states which suffered the greatest losses of civilian population. a distinctive culture and identity. Russia and Poland alternately dominated the region and developed a falsified view of Belarus as a cultural desert: the Russian perspective THEME 1: THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURES focused on the subjugation to Poland and the aping of alien western cultural forms; whereas the Polish perspective saw all Eastern Orthodox Slavs as barbarian pagans The majority of original Crossroads settlers came from the South. These were not the unless civilized by Polish ways and the adoption of Catholicism. At a cursory glance, representatives of Coastal South plantation-based culture, but poor yeomen of the the dearth of Belorussian cultural figures of wide renown would seem to support such Upper South. From the Virginian and Carolinian Piedmont, these people retreated pejorative views. As the Belorussian language was reduced to the role of peasant patois, west into the isolation of Appalachia and then moved beyond, where they found and upward social mobility depended on learning first in Polish and then in Russian, a similar forested environment. In this fashion, Upper South culture spread all the Belorussians themselves came to be known under Polish, Russian, or Lithuanian labels. way to the Ozarks, ensuring a degree of cultural unity across the region. Many early For example, the American Revolutionary War hero, Thaddeus Kosciuszko (often migrants into Kentucky later moved across the Ohio river. While Cincinnati with its identified as a Pole) was Belorussian by birth, as was the great poet Adam Mickiewicz, Kentucky suburbs is a typical industrial metropolis of the Heartland, southern Illinois who wrote in Polish and Lithuanian and is claimed by both cultures. Under Polish rule and Indiana with their rolling hills and marginal economies are not typical of the both the language and faith of Belarus withstood severe onslaught. Between 1620 and richer agricultural Midwest. In fact, the southern portion of Illinois was in the past a 1654 the Jesuit order unleashed religious wars against non Catholics which cost Belarus northern extension of the cotton belt stretching along the Mississippi, and large African 55 percent of its population. Because the use of Cyrillic characters in the Belorussian American populations were brought into the area for work on the plantations. language ensured a strong bond with the Russian language and church (in contrast to Mid-Atlantic culture was carried into the Crossroads by migrants following the Ohio the Latin based Catholic Church), even the public use of Belorussian was prohibited in River, a major route used by settlers from Pennsylvania. From the 1840s numerous 1696. Germans from their European exodus moved into the Ohio valley where they And yet, far from being culturally sterile, Belorussia developed into a relay station frequently still outnumber residents of Anglo-Saxon heritage. Although most Germans for western culture movement into Russia. Thus in the 16 17th centuries, Belorussia in the area were Catholics (traditionally more conservative than German Protestants), became the easternmost participant in the European Renaissance. It was through the they brought a whiff of fresh liberal air into the Crossroads, including the virulent mediating offices of educated Belarus that the faint wisps of western humanism reached rejection of slavery. These overlapping patterns of past migrations are evident in the 17th century Russia and paved the way for its opening up under Peter the Great. Well region today in the dilution of typically southern cultural traits. Thus travelers from the into the 18th century the Crossroads preserved its role as cultural mediator. Between North will begin to note slightly slower speech and a distinct “southern drawl” once 1700 and 1760 Belorussians and Ukrainians outnumbered Russians among the they cross the Ohio River, but those traveling north into the Crossroads from the 11 12 hierarchy and theologians of the Russian Orthodox Church. In the literary movement South will note that the drawl is less pronounced. The pace of life is not as fast as in the known as Latinism, western educated Slavs composed orderly and imitative verses and urban areas of the Core or the Heartland, nor is it as slow as one might associate with odes in Latin. The authors were frequently Catholics, since church sponsored education the South. was the Belorussian’s rare opportunity for upward progress, but, ironically, the topic In national politics the region is never consistently associated with either liberal or of the odes was likely to be the glorification of the ancient splendor of Orthodox conservative votes. Legislators and officials at all levels are more likely to prefer taking Kievan Rus. Himself a Latinist, Franciscus Skorina worked on the revival of Russian/ a “wait and see” attitude before acting. To the northener the wait may seem too long, Belorussian as a literary language by cleansing it from Polonisms. The first printed while to the southener it may not be long enough. While conservatism (especially books and Bible in Russian were published in Minsk, showing the deep respect for in rural areas) can be seen in the large number of dry counties (not selling alcoholic learning among Belorussians, a characteristic which still serves them well today. beverages), in opposition to gambling, and in support for teaching creationism and In many ways Belorussians seem to be western Europeans in Russian guise, and the prayer in schools, conservative sentiments are far from uniform within the region. Crossroads to be the easternmost West. But then, the opposite is true as well; if Newcomers, especially from the north, tend to broaden the region’s somewhat parochial language is the greatest element of self identification, the Crossroads is the westernmost outlook, and sometimes the urban social and political climate is very distinct from the bulwark of things Russian. The extreme proximity of the Russian language to traditional rural atmosphere. During the 1980s, Lexington twice voted on whether Belorussian (far more so than to Ukrainian) and the role of Russian as the language of restaurants should be able to sell liquor on Sundays. In much of “dry” Kentucky, such science and vehicle to high social achievement explain the Belorussians’ near universal sales were considered an unacceptable and unwelcome innovation. In Lexington the adoption of Russian. Russian language schools have numbered three out of every vote passed the second time, in what some residents consider proof that the city’s four in the republic, even though Belorussians account for 78 percent of their state’s newcomers from the north and reformed native Kentuckians vote in tandem. population. Attempts to revive the Belorussian language are supported only by a The North and South mix together at the Crossroads, creating a surprising mosaic handful of Minsk literati in obvious contrast to Ukrainian linguistic revivalism. within a relatively small region. For example, Little Egypt (around Cairo in Southern Perhaps due to a history of Polish oppression and the devastation of the Second World Illinois) with its acute rural poverty is to our day something of a deep southern enclave War, the Crossroads is understandably wary of the West, and looks more toward Russia. within the region. The Bluegrass area with its physical beauty and rich soil seemed fit Belarus never knew secessionism or possessed a nationalist movement comparable to for establishing plantations, and once attracted many aristocrats from Virginia and the Ukrainian one, and the separate Belarus state was twice created by external forces: Maryland. This “aristocractic” outlook is evident in its social life and unique landscape, after the Revolution by Moscow’s desire for a buffer state on the boundary with hostile as well as in the noble mainstays of the local economy: horse farms, bourbon distilling Poland, and in 1991 by the dissolution of the USSR. The region’s dramatic resurrection (the area used to account for 85 percent of national output), and tobacco production after the complete destruction of the Second World War encouraged allegiance to the introduced from Virginia. These traits are no less pronounced in middle Tennessee in Soviet Union as well. In many ways, Belorussia (along with Lithuania, Estonia, and the Nashville Basin, which along with the Bluegrass remains something of an oasis of 13 14 Latvia) evolved into a showcase of socialist success, the more efficient “westernized” the Old South. Traditions of cultural sophistication make Lexington and Nashville brand of Soviet socialism, and has therefore been much less reform-minded than (in the past called the “Athens of the South”) vie for the title of cultural capital of the some other USSR successor states. There could not be a greater contrast than that Crossroads. At the same time, Nashville is best known as the world capital of country of Belorussian allegiance to Russia (and later to the Soviet Union) with strong anti music, a style which is actually a heritage from the southern Appalachians. Even the Russian and anti Soviet sentiment in Western Ukraine or Lithuania adjoining the Old Mountains region has something of a smaller replica within the Crossroads - the Crossroads. Ozark Plateau, which resembles Appalachia in its gentle upland topography, low level of economic development, and relative cultural isolation. What an irony, then, that it was Lithuania which in a sense preserved these lands for Russia. The very survival of Belarus as an entity in the Russian-Polish tug of war is If the Crossroads is tugged between North and South culturally, it at least faced largely due to its historic association with the Grand Principality of Lithuania, where westward. The westward dynamic of the region is symbollized by the life of that Russian was long used as official language and the regime tolerated Orthodox culture. legendary pioneer, Daniel Boone, who grew up in North Carolina, led the first settlers Belorussians therefore were able to remain Orthodox, and peasants called themselves into Kentucky, and died in Missouri. Frontier leaders like Boone left a lasting imprint simply “Russian;” the name “Belorussian” only came into use in the late 18th century. on the region. In the opinion of Ellen Churchill Semple, a geographer from Louisville who wrote about Anglo-Saxons in Eastern Kentucky in 1901, those who grew up in Even today, some traits of Belorussians resemble those of Lithuanians and other Baltic the westward-facing Crossroads were the first genuine white Americans (the seabord nations: industrious, disciplined, and lacking the anarchist bent of both Poles and population were but Europeans, transplanted across the ocean). In 1796 a traveling Russians, who see these qualities as docility and submissiveness. Rational and level Frenchman remarked that the inhabitants of the Atlantic coast called the lands beyond headed, Belorussians shun the mysticism and religious fervor of their neighbors, which Applachia the Back Country, but the new, trans-Appalachian Americans applied the the latter certainly interpret as a lack of spirituality. With a reputation for being honest, same name to the Atlantic coast. The region became the earliest embodiment of traits reliable, quiet, and soft spoken people, they once again contrast with ebullient Russians that later came to be considered the generic American frontier heritage: democratism, and Poles. vigor, enterprise and independence. The region does indeed seem all-American in The identity of the Crossroads is a sum of contradictions. While hardly distinguishable self-identification by many of its residents, with a high proportion of persons claiming from Russia in language, proud of its role as Russia’s defender and faithful to socialist their ethnic identity as simply “American”, rather than German- , Irish-, or some other ideals, the region also somehow shares a superiority complex about belonging to the hyphenated American group. West. It is not merely a blurred zone of overlap between Russian and Polish cultures with no identity of its own: in fact, the most distinguishing feature in Belorussian character may be stubbornness and resilience. People in the region simply know they are different. 15 16 THEME 2: CRISS-CROSSING THE VOLATILE REGION THEME 2: CRISS-CROSSING THE VOLATILE REGION Torn asunder, the Crossroads found peace and calm only within the Russian Empire, The prohibitive costs of transporting produce upstream and across the mountainslong but it was a deadly calm. The dynamic industrial regions of the Empire surrounded focused the commercial interests of the Crossroads on the Mississippi River. Until the the Crossroads on all four sides: St. Petersburg and Riga to the North, Donbass to the railway age, most regional produce was sent downstream to New Orleans and from south, Moscow and the Central Industrial region to the east and the well-industrialized there by sea to the east coast. So paramount was the role of New Orleans as the de Kingdom of Poland to the west. The region was crossed by transit railways that linked facto regional business capital that in 1799, the federal government had great difficulty the industrial areas with each other and effectively prevented any significant industrial preventing an expedition of local militias to capture it from Spanish hands. The route growth in the intervening space of the Crossroads. The region did not even benefit became even more important when, between the 1830 and 1850 the old Louisiana-to- much from the final improvement to the ancient transportation system, when in the Quebec waterway finally acquired the missing link: a system of canals that connected late 18th century two major canals were constructed linking the Dnieper with the rivers the Ohio’s major northern tributaries with the Great lakes. It was soon clear, however, Neman and Bug, leading respectively to the Baltic and into Poland. This impressive that the competition to become “Main Street USA” was won by the Heartland even waterway allowed direct navigation from Ukraine to Germany, but it was useless for though the Crossroads controlled the major water thoroughfares and was populated Belarus, which it traversed in the least developed Polesye region. The only important earlier. Prime location proved to be less important than the expanding market and commercial centers of the Crossroadss (and still its major cities) were those located on growing industrial muscle of the Heartland. Instead of encouraging local industry, the the Dnieper axis: Vitebsk, Mogilev, and Gomel. Beyond them the bypassed region lost new canals took the mineral and forest wealth of the rugged terrain to be processed in much of its old cottage industry and acquired a strikingly rural character. the urban Heartland. However, the sandy or waterlogged soils of the Crossroads with their ubiquitous Today, the economic base of many Crossroads communities remains marginal and birches and peat bogs are barely suitable for farming. The only staple that thrives on dependent on northern control. In parts of southern Illinois, Indiana, and western these poor soils is the potato, which in the past was the basis of the Belorussian diet Kentucky the significant economic enterprise is coal mining. Strip mines produce and exposed the populace to frequent potato famines. Native Belorussians in particular high sulfur coal which faces stiff competition from better coals produced in Wyoming suffered from rural poverty, as they were practically left out of urban life where Jews and Montana, even among utility companies in Kentucky. Forest products industries, and to a lesser extent, Poles, dominated. In 1897 Jews made up 18 percent of the including paper and pulp and small furniture enterprises, also face competition with total population of Belarus, but half the urban population. When the Russian Empire companies farther south and overseas. The marginal nature of many of these enterprises acquired its western belt during the partitions of Poland, it also acquired the world’s is felt by the small communities for which they are the economic backbone. In terms of greatest concentration of Jews. Migration of Jews was limited beyond the so-called average per capita income, much of the Crossroads is near the bottom of state rankings, Pale of Settlement. The core of this huge territory stretching from Riga to Rostov was with Kentucky and Tennessee 43rd and 42nd in the United States. Yet there are former Polish lands: Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Before the great exodus to exceptions to the marginal rural economies, for example in Kentucky’s “Golden 17 18 America and Palestine in the late 19th century, more than half of the world’s Jews were Triangle” linking Cincinnati-Lexington-Louisville and in the Nashville Basin. The concentrated within the Pale. It was here that the distinctive Yiddish-based Jewish growth of such cities as Saint Louis, Louisville, and Nashville continues to be helped by culture of small townships (schtetls) was finally shaped and such important religious busy navigation along the important water arteries, but for the Crossroads as a whole developments as Hassidism occurred. most of the traffic passing through it is strictly transit. In contrast to the Heartland, the Crossroads is not so much a thriving business hub on a busy downtown intersection as After the emancipation of the serfs, with poverty pressing and opportunities beckoning a crossing of country roads. beyond the region, the overpopulated land of potato famines became the land of emigration. The more enterprising element of the population was washed out of the Although cultures meet and cross-fertilize in the region, major migration flows after region in all directions. Between 1896 and 1912 Belorussia generated 16 percent of the the mid-nineteeenth century largely bypassed it. The Crossroads was not northerly settlers who moved to Siberia, although it accounted for only 8 percent of European enough for job-seeking migrants from the South, while in recent decades it proved Russia’s population. The Crossroads did not have a single university, and aspiring not warm or exotic enough to attract Sunbelt-bound businesses or retirees. Instead, youths, many of them sons of Polish nobility or Jewish merchants, had to go elsewhere. marginal economies encourage massive outmigration, especially toward the nearby Thus, the most feared of the early Bolsheviks, KGB founder Felix Dzerzhinsky, came industrial Heartland and the Atlanta metropolitan region. Bypassed by the intellectual from a family of impoverished petty Polish nobility in Belorussia, but his life and mainstreams, the Crossroads retained a strong rural flavor that may be seen in the revolutionary activity were divided between Lithuania, Poland and Moscow; in the relatively slow pace of political and social reforms. 19th century, hundreds of thousands left for the new lands of the Breadbasket and The region preserves a strongly rural character. The proportion of rural population for the port of Odessa, where the tradition-bound Jew of a schtetl finally found open in Kentucky was 50 percent in 1990, twice the national average, and most urban horizons. The sons of the first wave of migrants left through the porous Pale line for the population lives in small towns. The land, aside from the Bluegrass and Nashville university centers of Russia, becoming doctors, lawyers and industrialists, or radicals Basin areas, is marginal, and farms are small and not suitable for highly productive who constituted the backbone of either the Bolshevik party (like the famous Leon agriculture. The farms are seldom specialized to the degree they are in the Heartland, Trotsky) or the Zionist movement. and they often mix beef cattle, hogs, corn, wheat, and (in Kentucky) tobacco. Small In retrospect it seems clear that the central location of the Crossroads was a very mixed farmers cannot compete with large agribusinesses, and many farmers must maintain blessing. The region has never been more than a dependent pawn of its powerful full-time jobs off the farms. Many will commute seventy or eighty miles to small neighbors, alternately serving as either the thriving hub of interaction between them industrial plants or to seek service employment in county seats or mid-sized cities. or a devastated buffer zone. After the Second World War, the ancient role of the region Because of the region’s strong agricultural heritage, outdoor living is very popular. was resurrected as a hub of Slavic lands united within the Eastern bloc. Its locational Hunting and fishing are favorite pastimes, and many enthusiasts proudly display their advantage allowed the Crossroads to return to its status as a relay station, but this time guns or fishing poles in the rear window of pickup trucks. Community and church for the adoption of western technologies. Railways which had previously drained life celebrations and civic festivals are an important part of social life, as are family 19 20 out of the region now helped develop modern industry in the Crossroads, augmented gatherings. Many communities have developed special “days” during the past decade by pipelines leading into Europe. If Belarus (and Lithuania) entered the postwar years to bring in tourism or to promote boosterism, local pride, and dollars into the local as the least developed parts of the European USSR, they emerged as the most dynamic economy. Metropolitan newspapers carry descriptions of such upcoming small town and successful regions by the time of the country’s dissolution. events as music and craft fairs, outdoor performances, food events (ice cream socials) or local beauty pageants. Although such activities are not unusual for small-town Since the republic had skilled and disciplined labor but almost no mineral resources, America elsewhere, they round out the image of the Crossroads as an embodiment of the emphasis was on advanced industries: electronics, automobile building (sturdy poorer rural America with its low budget forms of relaxation and leisure. Maybe it is no agricultural tractors and trucks), engineering, and the chemical industry. In levels coincidence that the famous Kentucky colonel of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame, and of per capita GNP, Belorussia by the late 1980’s was in the leading group of Soviet the founder of the WalMart retail goods chain were both from the region. republics, well ahead of Ukraine. Belarus was the only republic other than Russia to have a positive balance of domestic trade within the USSR in the early 1990s. The In recent decades the drain of the region’s resources seems to be abating. Transportation frenzy of industrial development rapidly made the region predominantly urban, again proved crucial: as interstate highways opened the region during the 1970s, central with the proportion of urban population in Belarus rising from 43 percent to 66 location relative to U.S. markets and proximity to the industrial Heartland proved percent between 1970 and 1990. Minsk was the fastest growing of Soviet cities with beneficial. The region attracted branch plants of companies with headquarters in large populations of over a million throughout the postwar years. northern cities. Although many such jobs are low paying and demand low skills, the Crossroads also seems to enjoy a peculiar revenge toward the Heartland with location The very name Minsk means “the place of exchange,” and Belarus was a leader within in the region of some major new automobile plants, including General Motors’ popular the Soviet Union in the rate of trade it conducted. But it also meant that the economy “Saturn,” the Nissan pickup plant near Nashville, and a large Toyota Camry plant near was vulnerable: Belarus received almost all raw materials and energy from Russia, Lexington. This plant even hired some workers who became unemployed because of and marketed the products of its highly specialized manufacturing beyond its own closures in Michigan and Ohio. Nashville also has an aviation industry and extensive boundaries. The very economic survival of the Crossroads thus still depends upon banking and insurance industry that earned it the nickname “Southern Wall Street.” unified commerce and the splintering of the economy across the former USSR has hurt General Electric operates a huge electric appliances factory in Louisville. IBM in its the region. heyday built a large plant in Lexington in the 1960s, and with its excellent amenities Both the need for and the precariousness of Slav unity were dramatically brought and low unemployment the city became a magnet for out-of-state migrants, including into focus by the nuclear catastrophe of Chernobyl which contaminated areas in all many highly educated professionals. three Slav republics of Belorus, Ukraine, and Russia. Although the plant is located in Despite recent upturns, the whole history of the Crossroads suggests that optimism Ukraine, the lion’s share of damage was suffered by Belarus, and both republics blamed about the future should be tempered with caution. The drawback of its central location Russia for the accident. is in the volatility of its fortunes being determined by events outside the region. Saint 21 22

THE BREADBASKET THE BREADBASKET Aleksei Novikov and Raymond Krishchyunas Thomas Baerwald

There is hardly a person in Russia not familiar with the name Uryupinsk. Invariably, The landscapes of the flat plains in the center of the United States have always it is uttered with a contemptuous sneer and even sounds somewhat indecent in generated strong opposing judgments. Hamlin Garland, raised in South Dakota Russian. Uryupinsk became the embodiment of what Soviet Marxist ideology with in the late 19th century, expressed one view: “How poor and dull and squalid it its strong anti-peasant thrust branded as the “idiocy of rural life.” At first sight seemed! The one main street ended at the hillside at his left and stretched away Uryupinsk, a small town lost amidst the flat grain fields, is a sleepy hollow that has to the north between two rows of the usual village stores, unrelieved by a tree or a grown torpid from boredom. In summer, all is sultry and downcast in a dull feather touch of beauty.” grass steppe, once in a while crossed by a chain of low hills, much like Chekhov’s But others see different textures in the landscape. From any small knoll in central description of the rural scene: “A kite-bird glides right over the surface, smoothly Iowa, for example, you can gaze out in all directions at rectangles of green and flapping its wings and suddenly stops in midair, as if struck with the thought of yellow. Different shades of green dominate. Taller stalks of corn undulate in the how boring life is.” Much akin to their crops, the locals seem to spend their lives breeze, while the deeper green of the soybean bushes crouch lower and are more locked into unchanging seasonal cycles. still. In contrast with the corduroy texture of the row crops, scattered fields of Yet the air of slumber is deceptive. At harvest time the place awakens to frenetic golden wheat sway in the gentle wind like a finely woven sheet. activity, as what was called in sovietspeak “the battle for the harvest” began, and To some people such a summer scene of the rural Breadbasket makes it the the national media touted the best workers in places like Uryupinsk as heroes of most boring place in America, but these landscapes have their own beauty, and bread harvesting campaigns. These annual fenzies were actually a modern twist their placidity is deceptive. As the late summer turns into autumn, the landscape on the real battles that Cossacks fought here against Russia’s nomadic neighbors. changes abruptly. Large combines strip first the wheat and then the soybean Uryupinsk once was a district headquarters of the Cossack armies and was and corn fields. Trucks of all sizes pulse along the roadways, carrying many also widely known for its vibrant district fairs. In modern times, both the unique of the kernels and beans to silver, cone topped storage bins beside the area’s militarized lifestyle of the Don River Cossacks and this lively commercial activity farmsteads. Other truckloads will unload their cargoes at the massive, cylindrical are reviving, underlining again the traditional ambiguity of a region sleeping with a concrete grain elevators that loom over every village and town in the region. Like ready eye open. the crops around whose planting and harvest the region’s economy revolves, the rhythms of the American Breadbasket are geared to the seasons. Despite long periods with little apparent activity in summer and winter, the fields of the Breadbasket provide enormous yields that help keep Americans well nourished 1 2 and supplement the diets of millions of people in other parts of the globe. ~ Qj A s s ~ R u ~ ,-.. ~ oral (t:lal'sk) ,.c ~/

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OKLAHOMA sza ck sea Oklaho~a City 3 4 - RUSSIA’S FERTILE TRIANGLE AMERICA’S FERTILE TRIANGLE The Breadbasket region is first and foremost Russia’s granary. The majority of Since the 1840s, when immigrants from eastern and southern states and from Europe people actually live in cities and work outside agriculture, but the popular and not started settling the region in large numbers, the Breadbasket has been a region focused so misleading image of the region is sharply brought into focus during harvesting on agriculture. Few parts of the world produce as much food, and while the number campaigns, when newspapers are crowded with photographs of the campaign heroes, of people who live and work on farms has steadily declined during this century, the the best harvester operators set against the backdrop of mountains of threshed grain. ebb and flow of the farm calendar still regulate the rhythms of the region, just as the Like their Egyptian counterparts, these pyramids of grain convey a somewhat sacral fortunes and failures of the agricultural economy establish the roller coaster on which image, and were part of the official myth of the happy socialist village, while the major many other establishments ride. Agriculture remains the backbone of economic activity, product of the Breadbasket, wheat, is something of a national cultural symbol. and farms dominate rural landscapes. The harsh conditions of Russian regions limited staple grains to the coarser varieties, The Breadbasket’s agricultural bounty results from the lavishness of nature. Nowhere such as rye or barley, and wheat bread became a lingering symbol of bounty and well- else in the world is there such a large region with an ideal combination of fertile black being. Honored guests are still greeted with the present of a ceremonial loaf, and soils, a sufficiently warm and moist climate, and flat terrain. When Vermont native Russians eat far more bread than any western nation. Russian language abounds with Robert Frost saw the prairie soils, he reportedly remarked that they could be eaten sayings like “Bread is master of everything,” and to the extent that such sayings are true, without the bother of conversion into plants. Because of the region’s interior location, the Breadbasket is the master of the country. the temperatures are continental, with daily averages differing by more than 70 degrees F (40 degrees C) between winter and summer. Annual average precipitation is quite In most of Russia, climate makes agriculture akin to Russian roulette, rather than an adequate (from 20 to 40 inches), but often streaky. Periods of drought or heavy rains orderly activity with predictable outcomes. But the Breadbasket was and is a region often last for months or even years. Droughts rarely extend throughout the region, with a stable output of surplus grain and other products, which makes it vitally however. The large area of the Breadbasket relative to the fluctuating pressure systems important for feeding the mostly urban nation. The region became Russia’s cornucopia and jet streams ensures that abundant yields in some parts more than offset diminished thanks to its black soils, the chernozems, named for the thickness of the black organic harvests in others. The region therefore is always a major exporter of food products. layer that accounts for their proverbial fertility. According to a common saying, it is enough to stick a broomstick into the soil for something good to grow out of it. During The triangular shape of the modern Breadbasket is remarkably similar to the area east the Paris International Fair of 1900 a sample of Russian chernozem was dubbed as the of the 100th meridian that two centuries ago was dominated by grasses. The region’s world standard of soil fertility. eastern point thrusts into central Indiana and the Heartland region. In his sweeping study of the places and characteristics associated with the term “the Middle West,” geographer James R. Shortridge observed that all Midwestern states historically were 5 6 The natural vegetation of the Breadbasket is that of the steppe, the Russian grasslands. associated with the pastoral image. But as manufacturing became preeminent in the Over milennia, the decaying stems and massive roots of tall grasses enriched the organic urban centers of the eastern Middle West, that region emerged as a not-so-bucolic content of the soil, while the flatness of the steppes allowed for orderly landscapes industrial Heartland. In terms of culture, the Breadbasket is part of Midwest and a of huge rectangular fields. On this flat and monotonous plain, the boundaries of continuation of Heartland, but differs in its agricultural profile. The Breadbasket’s the region (which fittingly enough resembles a ploughshare in outline) are a classic western boundary is similarly defined by the growing importance to the west of non- expression of the relationship between human activity and a precarious physical agricultural activities and landuse. As Joel Garreau stated, the boundary follows the environment. Farming is a risky business in the steppe belt, where average yearly rains line “where carbohydrates become more important than hydrocarbons.” The “middle” from 12 to 20 inches are not generous. The harvest can be scuttled not so much by a in the name Middle West when applied to the Breadbasket today designates not only a dry year but by the unpredictability of the climate itself. Despite these ups and downs, geographic position but also a symbolic median between the industrialized East and the the Breadbasket performed a crucial food supply function, located between the better- more natural West. watered farmland of the South and a region where soils become too dry to support farming without irrigation. The Breadbasket provided a wedge between cultures as well, From Buffalo Range to the Granary since this drier land on its southeast flank was home to populations of Asiatic ancestry. Today the landscapes of the Breadbasket are as tame as those found in any American Today the Breadbasket is a bucolic landscape of European-style farming, but in the region. Yet only 150 years ago these lands were a nomadic range. Confrontations past the whole region was the scene of prolonged fighting between the worlds of the between alternative possible uses of this environment, between farmer and rancher, sedentary European farmer and the Asian nomad. Gained by Russians only in the settler and nomad, were an important part of the region’s history and help define its closing years of the 18th century, the Breadbasket became the symbolic middle between western boundary. the developed and tamed Slav/European part of the country and its unruly Asiatic In the early 1800s, when future President James Monroe asserted that the territory of periphery. Illinois was a flat plain unadorned by a single tree and so barren that it would never The Cossack Range to the Granary attract enough population to form a state, he was wrong about both the future and the past. Even before Europeans arrived, the indigenous people had long been reshaping Just as the region’s climate alternates devastating droughts with good years, so its the natural landscape of the region. For example, the climate is suited to broadleaf history is a seesaw between the farmer and the cattleman. The steppes were fleetingly deciduous forests, but the emergence of natural grasses as the dominant vegetation dominated by such diverse and more sedentary peoples as Christianized Germanic (with forests limited to river valleys) was fostered by frequent fires ignited by Native Goths, the Khazarean Jews from the Lower Volga, Kievan Slavs, and Muslim Bulgars, Americans to aid their hunting. Tribes like the Dakota were edged into the region but it was the nomad who always regained the upper hand. The northern boundary of from the east by the struggles between the French and English around the Great Lakes. the region is laid down not only by nature, but also by history, as Russian expansion Forced out of the woodlands that nourished them for centuries, these tribes accepted 7 8 Many people think of the Cossack as quintessentially Russian, but Cossacks (from the horses that were the unintended gifts of early Spanish colonists in the southwest, the Turkic word for “adventurer”) would pointedly draw a line between themselves and became expert mounted hunters. The buffalo that roamed the prairies by the After the rain the earth was swollen and other Russians. The beginnings of the Cossack story may be traced to the Tatar millions became their primary source of sustenance, and nomadic tribes scattered Again, the engine's drone, the with moisture and, when the wind warbands of the steppe, expert horsemen who lived by the plunder of adjacent states themselves across the grasslands west of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. scrape scattered the clouds, it languished or mercenary service, and Cossacks include both Slavic and Tatar blood. Only in the of stone on steel. You can feel Just as human beings altered natural conditions, the region’s environment required in the dazzling sunlight and steamed 16th century did the Slavic element finally predominate among the Zaporozhian your back relax, the tingle in your with a dove-grey haze...Over the major adjustments from the people who entered it. White settlers who entered feet, can smell Cossacks of Ukraine and the Don Cossacks of Russia when a swelling flow of fugitives steppe the quitch-grass rose above eastern parts of the region in the first half of the 19th century saw its opportunities dark earth and remember a day from serfdom fled into the steppes. Yet the Cossacks still preserve many Asiatic features the knee. Beyond the pasture and challenges differently from Native Americans and ushered in a new stage of you prepared the field for growth, lands the melilot was in blossom. in their garb and their wildly courageous mounted fighting techniques. During the the rolling sod streaming back and transformation. Many early pioneers moving into the Breadbasket from their In the late afternoon its honeyed Napoleonic Wars, frightened Europeans who saw Cossack troops marching down the scouring accustomed forest environments found the paucity of trees disconcerting, while the scent spread all through the village, boulevards of Paris gave rise to legends of their military prowess. While their teachers shares to a shine, the poetry filling the girls' hearts with a fretting densely intertwined roots of prairie grasses made plowing difficult. Yet they quickly of straight lines across a flat field. (the steppe Tatars) increasingly allied themselves with Isamic powers, Slav Cossacks languor. The winter wheat extend- discovered that those dense grasses provided the humus that made the region’s soils (superficially Orthodox) had a growing sense of affinity with Russia. But they also ed right to the horizon in a solid fertile. The invention of the steel plow (able to cut through the roots) by John Deere in Orval Lund, "Plowing", in Mark dark green wall; the spring grain saw themselves as independent people superior to Russian farmers, whom they called Vinz and Thom Tammaro, Inher- 1838 spurred rapid settlement in the region. rejoiced the eye with its unusually “muzhiks” (peasants) and despised as obsequious. The subjugation of the Cossacks to iting the Land, Contemporary close-sprouting shoots. the Russian crown was a drawn out stick-and-carrot process of converting them from The expansion of settlement onto the Great Plains after the Civil War did not proceed Voices from the Midwest, Univer- sity of Minnesota Press, 1993, p. Mikhail Sholokhov, Harvest on the rebellious anarchists into privileged frontier troops. Conflicting views about Cossacks as smoothly, however. The horses that made tribes like the Dakota, Comanche, 16. Don, Putnam, London, transl by reflect their ambiguous role: they are either praised as the heroic defenders of Russia Cheyenne, and Arapaho skilled hunters also permitted them to be mobile warriors. H.C. Stevens, p. 9 or scolded as defectors from the hardships of building the Russian state. While often And having watched numerous violations of treaties, they were not willing to acquiesce viewed as the expression of the independent and rebellious side to the Russian character to the relentless onslaught of white settlers. A series of bloody fights resulted, but and as Robin Hoods for the common people, they also were self-serving anarchists who during the 1870s, the rapid destruction of huge herds of bison and the advanced plundered Russian villages without qualm up until the 17th century. weapons of U.S. military forces doomed the Native Americans to lives on reservations in remote locales. The belatedly opened prairies were settled with amazing speed thanks Once the Russian monarchy drew the Cossacks to its side, they mutated into the elite to inventions like barbed wire and the rapid expansion of railroad networks from the corps of Russian army. The entire male Cossack population lived in military status as Heartland which provided access to rapidly growing markets in the east. By the 1890s, a permanent standing reserve for the army, but in exchange it was awarded with many the Great Plains were occupied with at least two people per square mile, and historian privileges. Thus the lands of the largest group, the Don Cossack Host, received a special Frederick Jackson Turner decreed that the frontier had ceased to exist in the United administrative status with a wide internal autonomy, and ownership of land within the States. 9 10 territory was denied to non-Cossacks. To preserve their warlike character, Cossacks were Despite Turner’s assertion, struggles between the range and the field never endedalong even once prohibited to farm, but as the frontier bypassed them many were forced into the western margin of the Breadbasket. In reality, the boundary is not a line but rather agriculture. With liberal land allotments and no landlords, Cossack farming thrived. a brushstroke on coarse paper that follows the whims of the climate with its dramatic periodic fluctuations in precipitation. As an approximation, the boundary can be drawn After the 1860s when imperial boundaries moved beyond the Caucasus and into at roughly the 100th meridian, with farms predominating to the east and ranches to the Central Asia, agriculture in the region decisively gained the upper hand. With the west. Although grain farming occurs well to the west of this meridian, including much influx of non-Cossack settlers released by the Emancipation, the virgin lands were of the northern wheat belt in Dakotas and Montana and part of the southern wheat rapidly transformed into an area of large-scale grain farming. But as the region acquired belt in Kansas and Texas, its extensive and largely marginal nature disqualifies those purely Slav character, its southern boundary became a sharp divide between the areas from inclusion in the Breadbasket. The fragility of farming there may be seen in world of the Slav farmer and that of the Asiatic cattle rancher. A step south from the the history of the Dust Bowl which effectively ended local farming in the 1930s. It has Breadbasket, Russian speech is drowned in the sea of Caucasian or Turkic languages. In since revived only with heavy reliance on groundwater from the Ogallala aquifer. The Eurasia, East and West are divided along a latitude, not a longitude, line. rapid development of the aquifer after the Second World War pulled the winter wheat With European occupation of the Breadbasket the steppe frontier was not yet closed; belt far to the south and west, but this water-induced expansion is strictly temporary. our region does not include all of the steppe granary, as the chernozem belt continues The rapid depletion of the Ogallala aquifer will eventually bring back the cattle. Thus beyond the Urals into the Virgin Lands of northern Kazakhstan. That area was opened the exclusion of areas west of the 100th meridian is true to the principle of defining our to European settlement only in 1889, when a flood of homesteaders was brought by regions as entities with longer life spans, which means unearthing deeper boundaries the Transiberian railroad. The decisive supremacy of farming and people of European that may be hidden beneath the “dust” of fleeting change. stock arrived only in the 1950s during the Virgin Lands campaign, when the area was transformed into a spring wheat belt. Cossacks played little role in opening up this eastern wing of the steppe belt, but that’s not the only reason for excluding it from our region. Although impressive in terms of output, grain farming in this area is extensive. Siberia-like winters and dry desert winds make it less predictable than anywhere else. The taming of the one-time range only seems to be complete.

11 12 THEME 1: AGRICULTURAL LANDSCAPES OF THE GRANARIES THEME 1: AGRICULTURAL LANDSCAPES OF THE GRANARIES The Mosaic of Fields The Mosaic of Fields With their bold step into the unfamiliar grassland environments of the Eurasian steppes As its name emphasizes, the American Breadbasket is a region where grain production (simultaneous with penetration into the American prairies and pampas), Europeans is the focal economic activity. The eight states (Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, claimed the few large areas of the world ideally suited for mechanized farming. The Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota) that occupy the bulk of the whole landscape of the region is dominated by huge geometrically laid-out fields. The region comprise 17 percent of the nation’s area, but they produce 29 percent of its Breadbasket leads the former USSR in the per capita extent of arable land, and the crops and 38 percent of its livestock products. Unlike other regions where feed for proportion of lands under plow reaches 80 to 90 percent. In the USSR the Breadbasket livestock must be imported, the Breadbasket’s hogs and cattle consume corn and other accounted for about a half of all grain production, as well as a major meat industry. crops produced locally, often on the same farm where they are fattened. Crops are harvested on nearly 60 percent of Iowa’s land and more than 55 percent of the land in The Breadbasket was the land of exemplary socialist agriculture, touted as a model Illinois, shares that are much larger than for any other states in the union. of the efficiency possible in kolkhozes (collective farms arranged as cooperatives) and sovkhozes (Soviet farms run by the state). This was probably the only region where Iowa and Illinois are at the core of the Corn Belt, the quintessential part of the the economy of scale allowed by collectivized agriculture outweighed the inherent Breadbasket. Climatic conditions enable corn to thrive in the fertile soils of the gently inefficiencies of the non-market agricultural economy. The development of the Sal rolling glaciated plains. Because of its myriad uses ranging from livestock feed to a steppes of Stavropol’ territory in the 1930’s provides a good example. The government cheaply processed liquid sweetener, corn has remained a more reliable source of created Socialist farms in the place of scattered homesteads and established centralized revenue than many other crops. The development of new uses for soybeans in recent farm machinery stations for optimal use throughout a large area. Plowing and decades has buttressed the market for this crop as well. Because corn and soybeans have irrigation of virgin lands was undertaken on a large scale, as on the appropriately complementary nutritional requirements, many farmers now grow both, alternating named sovkhoz “Giant” which incorporated 125,000 acres. annual production depending on soil and market conditions. Wheat and other small grains are more common in cooler or drier areas like the western margins of the In terms of grain harvests per acre the Russian Breadbasket was quite on par with Breadbasket. Throughout the region, however, farmers have become more specialized. its American sibling. Even such a generic illness of Soviet agriculture as the loss of Long gone are the days when farmers raised a variety of crops and animals, using small harvested produce due to inadequate transport, storage and processing, was far less machines and relying heavily on the labor of a relatively large family. acute here. The region pioneered the Soviet version of integrated agribusiness where Evidence of specialization abounds on the landscape. The Breadbasket has a large farms formed joint concerns with processing and storage operators and even obtained livestock production, but fences have become an endangered species in many parts of their own wholesale and retail outlets to control the entire chain from the field to the 13 the region, because crop farmers often have given up animals completely. Traditional 14 market. In stark contrast to the rest of the country, most Breadbasket collective farms barns are also less common. They frequently have been allowed to deteriorate, because were solidly in the black (the expression “millionaire-kolkhoz” for those with seven- they are too expensive to maintain simply for the storage of machinery. In their place, digit bank accounts originated), and collective farmers were well off. In the rate of large metal “polebarns” have been erected. While much less stylish to those who want private car ownership, the Breadbasket was well ahead of other regions in the Soviet traditional bucolic images, these utilitarian structures are far more functional. Where period. The rectangular grid of the fields lends the whole region a rather uniform hogs or beef cattle are raised, animals are often confined to barns and feedlots at aspect, but a closer look actually reveals considerable diversity of farms. Ubiquitous the core of the farmstead. Large cylindrical metal storage bins now hold dried corn bread aside, the labels of Breadbasket producers dominated on the canned meat, and other grains, used either to fatten livestock on site or simply stored until market vegetable, and fruit shelves of Soviet grocery stores. Southern Ukraine and the northern conditions warrant their sale and delivery to grain handling facilities. Caucasus had the most productive grain farming in the country, as well as productive Fields also provide ample evidence of the changing character of modern Breadbasket livestock breeding. agriculture. Although the number of farms in the region has declined by more than The change as you move from west to east is very gradual. The appearance of irrigation one-half from 1930 to the present, the total area used for farming has remained almost ditches and sheep flocks betrays the growing dryness and harshness of climate, and exactly the same. With farms averaging more than 440 acres (200 ha) in area, farmers beyond the Volga high soil fertility combined with a dry, sunny climate favors the now make great use of machines to perform increasingly specialized functions. Large, cultivation of some of the world’s best strains of hard wheat. Nature itself seems to have specialized equipment moves across fields at critical stages in the growing cycle. Rented suggested a balanced mix of crops for the Breadbasket: the growing cycles of corn and wheat combines move up and down the western margins of the Breadbasket, harvesting wheat are complementary, and a year of a failed corn harvest is frequently a bumper different strains of wheat for hundreds of farmers. In contrast, farmers specializing in year for wheat. The discrepancy between cycles of drought in western and eastern parts corn and soybeans, the most important Breadbasket crops, usually possess their own of the region also lends stability to its overall grain output. equipment. The economy of smaller urban places of the region is rooted in agriculture. Some of The imprint of agriculture is also present in the cities. Operations that handle and them are actually the so-called agri-cities-headquarters of huge collective farms and process farm products long have functioned within communities both large and small. the site for their processing industries. The local chemical fertilizer industry and major Flour mills, vegetable canneries, meat packing plants, sugar beet refineries, and other agricultural machinery and tractor building factories meet the needs of farming. Yet food processors stand at crucial points along rivers, railroads, and highways. In some metropolises such as Tzaritzyn, Kharkov, and Rostov, where large agricultural plants are communities, the visual impact of these plants is accentuated by smells. Visitors to located, do not quite belong: they are in, but not of, the region. The coastal cities along Decatur, Illinois, for example, quickly learn that a soybean processor is the city’s largest the Black Sea from Odessa to Nikolaev to Mariupol’ were once major grain exporting employer if they approach the city center from downwind. Other factories assemble centers, but today their economies are geared to the all-Russian manufacturing complex farm machinery, and most of the massive machines that churn over the Breadbasket’s rather than local needs, while culturally they share the cosmopolitan mix of other Black fields were manufactured within the region. 15 16 Sea ports. The affiliation with other Volga cities is more important for Tzaritzyn and While many medium-sized cities dot the region, major metropolises are rare. The Saratov. A major cluster of Ukrainian million-plus cities (Donetzk, Dnepropetrovsk, economic character of the region fosters dispersed rather than concentrated activity, and Kharkiv and Zaporozh’ye) are all part of the Donetzk coal and metallurgical enclave. many major centers that serve the region are actually located outside its boundaries. Chicago is effectively the region’s capital, but its status as a diversified industrial and Thus even if the Breadbasket has more large cities than other regions, its real face is seen global service center functionally makes it part of the Heartland. Other major centers in villages or small towns, while the metropolises were long felt to be alien and viewed serving the region Dallas-Fort Worth, St. Louis, and Minneapolis-St. Paul exist along with suspicion. Smokestacks of steel did not easily root in the fertile soil. Only Rostov- or beyond its margins. Kansas City is the only metropolitan area with more than one on-Don (nicknamed the “the bread city”) can qualify as a truly regional metropolis. It is million residents that sits squarely within the region. revealing that during the Civil War in 1919 when the Don Cossacks were the backbone of the White troops, industrial Rostov (located amidst Don Cossack lands) remained The Breadbasket’s residents harbour a long-standing suspicion of large cities. Heavy the Bolshevik stronghold. Local xenophobia ripened as new settlers (not bound by reliance on transportation and grain-handling companies, many of which were based militaristic collectivism of the Cossacks) turned out to be much better entrepreneurs. outside the region, fueled the discomfort of many Breadbasket residents with what New tensions revived the old ambiguities of Cossack self-identity: on the one hand was perceived as excessive control by large external institutions. Because expenses these people saw themselves as Russia’s defenders and spoke Russian language, but on have a seasonal regularity while income fluctuates dramatically, most farmers have the other the proud Cossack distanced himself from the land-bound Russian muzhik. to rely heavily on loans. In addition to providing funds for operating expenses and The fact that Cossack identity is not dependent on ethnicity alone bears witness to the the purchase of land, banks have furnished money enabling purchases of expensive Breadbasket as a complex and thorough ethnic melting pot. equipment. While acquiring land and equipment frequently was deemed prudent in years with high yields and high prices, declines in farm income because of the vagaries The Mixture of Peoples of weather or markets regularly placed many farmers in financial peril. Their difficulties periodically led to sharp revisions in banking practices, much to the consternation of Ever since colonization started in Catharine the Great’s time, a rich ethnic mix defined farmers, whose longing for stability had brought diverse ethnic groups from all over the region, where peasant transplants from all over Europe easily sent down firm roots. Europe into the region in the first place. Because Russian peasants were tied to the land, the government issued an invitation to settle the empty steppes of “New Russia” (today’s Southern Ukraine) to land- The Mixture of Peoples hungry Europeans. The settlement began with “New Serbia,” when thousands of Serbs occupied what today is roughly Kirovograd oblast. People as diverse as Swedes and Different ethnic groups dominate in various parts of the region depending on the Armenians followed, but the ones who responded in great numbers were the Germans. timing of that area’s initial settlement relative to the major waves of internal migration and immigration from different nations. The ethnic pattern of the region changes from north to south, related to differences in climate and agricultural production. 17 18 With settlers promised religious freedom, towns and villages with names like Munich, Scandinavians were the largest group migrating into the northern part of the region, Stuttgart, or Strasbourg began to sprout in Novorossiya. By the early 20th century, while Germans were foremost among the complex mix that settled in the central states, most Germans had moved farther east into the steppes beyond the Volga, where an and descendants of immigrants from Great Britain were more common in the southern autonomous republic of Volga Germans existed between 1918 and 1941. The eastward tier. These broad generalizations mask the considerable complexity that abounded at drift of German settlers along the chernozem belt was tragically continued during local levels, however. Ukrainians, Germans from the Volga region, French emigres, and World War II, when they were deported to northern Kazakhstan and the Altai territory. numerous Canadians also filtered into the region. Widespread communication required Even in that new location, the majority of Germans prospered and their communities multilingual approaches. For a short period in the 1870s, official documents of the state became models of efficiency for Slav settlers. But while preserving compact of Nebraska were published in German, Swedish, and Czech as well as English. communities, most Germans are fully Russified and no longer speak German. The pattern of rural settlement in the Breadbasket facilitated the blending of this The Cossacks as well drifted to the East, following the movement of the steppe frontier. conglomerate of immigrants. The region’s farmers were not concentrated into small Many “unemployed” Don Cossacks bypassed by the frontier moved farther east to villages as was common in other parts of the world, so the inward-looking villages the Volga, Ural River, and Orenburg areas to guard the Kazakh frontier, while the could not serve as vehicles for perpetuation of cultural differences. The dispersed remainders of the Zaporozhian host were moved to the northern Caucasus. pattern of family farmsteads encouraged uniformity both of the people and of the landscape. Most immigrants and migrants from the eastern U.S. belonged to the same The Ukrainian flow eastward was the most spectacular. It started in the 16th century “nordic” family of European culture or its American derivatives, and by the time other when Muscovite government opened its lands in the so-called Sloboda Ukraine ethnic groups started migrating in significant numbers around the start of the 20th (present-day Kharkiv-DonBass area) for settlement by Ukrainians fleeing Polish Century, almost all farmland had already been settled. As a result, the Breadbasket oppression. Since the earliest section of the Breadbasket, Novorossiya, was mostly emerged as one of the most homogenous parts of the nation with the greatest colonized by Ukrainians, they were the first to develop the technique of plowing prevalence of white Americans. through the matted roots of the virgin steppe with heavy plows pulled by buffalo teams. The Ukrainian sod-busters were among the pioneers throughout the steppe belt all the In some ways, this model melting pot emerged as the embodiment of the nation as a way to its Siberian outcrops. In many parts of this belt, Ukrainians left a strong imprint whole. “See how it plays in Peoria”! long has been an expression anticipating that the on landscapes and speech patterns, and initially outnumbered Russians; but by now the reactions of residents in that central Illinois city will foreshadow those elsewhere in the two groups have almost completely blended and most Ukrainians claim Russian as a U.S. More recently, Des Moines, Iowa, has become a favored site for market researchers mother-tongue. to test how new products and advertising strategies may be received by consumers in other parts of the country. While changing demographics have significantly altered The industrial development of Novorossiya and the Northern Caucasus brought an the ways that other regions relate to each other, the Breadbasket remains as the middle influx of Russians. Today the population of Southern Ukraine is split between Russians ground, the part of the United States against which all others areas can be measured. 19 20 and Ukrainians in equal proportions, and Ukrainian nationalism there is rather The Breadbasket maintains its traditional association with values that Shortridge felt unpopular. On Cossack lands, the Cossacks were hopelessly outnumbered by Russians were central to the self image of the United States as a whole self reliance, democracy, proper even before the 1917 Revolution. The homogenizing environment of the and moral decency. Breadbasket and the Slav ancestry of major settler groups allowed the region to become Russia’s most efficient melting pot, more so than the Heartland, where the coexistence THEME 2: THE CHECKERBOARD OF GOVERNMENT ACTION of ethnic communities created an ethnic salad. Even the landscape of the region conveys the sense of immutable order. More than The blurred all-Slav identity of residents helped the region become something of a in any other region in the nation, the Breadbasket’s landscape is one of right angles. spokesperson for the nation, the embodiment of things all-Soviet. Here sociologists Observers of the region invariably use the term “checkerboard” to describe the regular sought the “average Soviet man,” and the slogans of many national economic initiatives pattern of square and rectangular fields separated by straight roads that intersect at were born. From Brezhnev to Gorbachev, the rulers of the USSR came from the regular intervals. The origin of this landscape rests in part with the gentle topography Breadbasket, the region that always enjoyed a rather special relationship with the state. of most parts of the region, as flat land permits people to establish fields and lay roads wherever they wish. THEME 2: THE CHECKERBOARD OF GOVERNMENT ACTION As independent Americans breached the Appalachians, however, Thomas Jeffersonand In satellite imagery, the Breadbasket looks like a blueprint made with a ruler and other leaders of the new federal government established a more direct means of dividing compass: rectangular fields, straight lines of irrigation canals, and protective tree belts new territories into units that could be sold. Starting in 1796, the General Land Office planted to block dry winds from the Asian interior. These flat expanses are like a clean of the U.S. commissioned surveyors to divide land owned by the federal government sheet of paper that almost invites a willing hand to draw geometric patterns. For the into square townships measuring six miles on a side. Townships were divided into 36 Soviet state with its itch to regulate everything, the temptation was irresistible. The one square mile sections, which in turn could be partitioned by halving and quartering region became a testing ground where simple two-dimensional “geometrical” solutions into tracts as small as 40 acres. Large scale subdivision and sale of public lands reached were sought to solve complex problems, while ignoring the “verticals” of three- its apogee as the wave of settlement rolled into the Breadbasket. dimensional human beings. Use of the rectangular survey system instituted a new form of order upon the land of No other region suffered so much by the forced collectivization of the 1930s. The the Breadbasket. The creation of square and rectangular subdivisions of land established government believed that the fertile soils of the Breadbasket nurtured the dangerous the framework for fields whose patterns have been altered only through expansion sprouts of capitalism exactly because the region was old Russia’s model of efficient when adjacent farms have been consolidated. Also significant was the placement of commercial farming. With much land and few people, the estates in the southern roads along sectional boundaries at one mile intervals throughout the Breadbasket. steppe were the first in Russia to resort to the use of modern farm machinery and free This regular lattice of roads is evident on photographs taken by satellites. 21 22 hired labor. The boom was such that prior to the 1917 Revolution, Russia remained The surveys that shaped the geometry of the region were but the first in anongoing the world’s largest exporter of grain. In this region that did not really know serfdom, series of official endeavors that affected the region. After 1862, land became available most farmers were the serednyaks (literally “middle” farmers) - the well-to-do who were free to homesteaders who occupied and improved the property for a period of at least Stalin’s prime target. Many serednyaks were Cossacks (since the Civil War regarded five years. Direct disbursement of land by the government was augmented by federal as hidden enemies of the Soviet order) or Ukrainians (permanently suspected of donations of land to the states for the support of education. From the early 19th nationalism). Century, one section of every 36 was donated for public schools, and in the 1860s, additional land was donated to states to support “land grant” universities. These public Stalin carried out collectivization with a vengeance. About 7 million peasants died institutions, which often specialized in the development of agricultural technology, in the terror of the campaign, while another 7 million died in its aftermath in the became the backbone of the higher educational system throughout the Breadbasket unprecedented man-made famine of 1932-33. This tremendous loss of life took place states. while the region was forced to provide grain exports to finance Soviet industrialization. Although the socialist farming built on this brutally “cleaned” arena eventually became Over the last half century, the role of government in the lives of the region’s inhabitants the country’s most successful, Russia never returned to its old role as an agricultural changed profoundly. As American agriculture matured and farm production increased products exporter to the world. Artificially low state procurement prices supplied no to the point that supplies far exceeded demands in the United States and abroad, the incentive to expand Breadbasket output, and what the shortsighted Kremlin economists federal government instituted a series of measures designed to reduce production and saved in the region was lost several times over as the USSR had to pay much higher increase prices. Widespread governmental intervention in farm production began in prices for foreign grain; since the 1960s the Soviet Union has been one of the world’s the 1950s, including the manipulation of trade policies, such as the export of surplus major importers. It is ironic that Soviet grain imports were coming from what were in a commodities to provide emergency relief for poorer nations. Other federal farm policies sense the overseas offspring of the Russian Breadbasket - the areas of the United States, have sought to inhibit soil erosion. These policies often succeeded in ending production Canada, and Argentina with large proportions of Ukrainian, Russian, or Russian- on marginal farmland, but they also had unintended consequences, including the German transplants. Strangely for the region that so suffered from the Soviet state, it drastic reduction in equipment and fertilizer sales that resulted in the mid 1980s when preserved its special rapport with official Soviet culture and ideology. This could reflect farmers were given surplus commodities from government stockpiles as replacements the tendency of its residents to reduce life’s complexities to simple two-dimensional for crops they would have grown themselves. formulas. The regional culture is a mix of populism and self-righteous common sense Ironically, such government programs are largely in response to the effects of unbridled which seems to know simple answers to all questions. The traditional suspicion of big individualism characterizing the culture of the Breadbasket. More than anywhere else cities and outsiders inculcated deep distrust of liberal ideas. The region’s population, what was happening in the region reflected the decisions of individuals each acting in once decimated by collectivization, still actively opposed market-oriented economic their own interests, while the bounty of mother nature tricked the local farmers into reforms. In Krasnodar, for example, privately run ventures were declared to be cancer believing that all their successes were due only to their superb skills and mastery of 23 cells on the healthy body of the people. 24 nature. Such over-confidence and a certain short-sightedness helped produce the Dust The history of relationship between the central power and Cossackdom is even Bowl conditions in the 1930s or the depletion of Ogallala basin today, as well as more paradoxical. On the one hand, the Cossacks long resisted state attempts at chronic crises of overproduction. At the same time, the farmers’ feeling of being regimentation of their lives; however, once won over they became the most faithful exploited from the outside and their traditional anti-urban bias frequently welled up and willing servants of the regime. In the Russian Empire, Cossacks were routinely into support for political movements like populism, progressivism, and even socialism used to disperse anti-government demonstrations and perform punitive functions. The that promised greater local control over major facets of economic activity -- traits most protection of the Empire’s boundaries turned into the safeguarding of its “foundations” paradoxical in a region of individualists well known as a bastion of the Republican and political conservatism. The Cossacks’ arrogant defiance of the state in the pursuit Party. of their collective privileges always coexisted with militaristic discipline and cruel Another irony is that the region so distrustful of big government should have come suppression of individual rights within the strata. Today, the emergence of self- to rely so heavily on large-scale governmental activity, and that the traditional appointed Cossack moral police makes public whipping of offenders a revived norm of xenophobia of the conservative farmer culture should tolerate such strong dependence local life. of the economy on the winds of international political change. During the 1970s, for The movement for the restoration of Cossack autonomy is driven not by ethnic example, exports of American farm products to the Soviet Union increased tenfold, sentiment, but by the desire to restore the coveted freedom of Cossackdom from the only to be abruptly curtailed in the wake of American condemnation of the Soviet binding laws obeyed by everyone else, to renew their special covenant with the state incursion into Afghanistan. as its well-rewarded defenders. The break-up of the Soviet Union was particularly While many observers feel that the ultimate resolution of America’s farm problems painful to a people who see themselves as builders of Imperial glory, and thus has calls for reduction of surpluses by requiring roughly a fifth to a quarter of the nation’s revived the traditional xenophobia of local culture. Even as Cossack movements seek farmers to cease production, no reasonable means of implementing such a policy territorial autonomy, most Cossacks favor the reanimation of the Soviet Union in its has been identified. The political costs of uprooting a half million or so households old boundaries. Now that the southern boundary of the Breadbasket has again become from the nation’s farmsteads likely are too great for any group of national leaders to Russia’s frontier with turbulent Asian neighbors, the new Russian state has to fight the bear, especially given the significant power wielded by congressmen from states in the temptation to use the Cossacks as willing pawns in new games of geopolitical chess. Breadbasket. On the other hand, the vast majority of the United States’ residents, who As the rural dreaminess of the Breadbasket alternates with the insomnia of Cossack live in metropolitan areas seemingly independent of the farms that surround them, vigilance, the region seems to have reverted to the old fights between peaceful settlers like the relatively low food prices that result from oversupply. As a result, they do not and professional warriors, only now they joust within the regional character. The region favor drastic changes in national farm policies. The farmers of the Breadbasket and the of many a paradoxical about-face is again in uncertainty what to arm itself with: a thousands of other residents whose lives depend significantly on what transpires in the Cossack whip or a peasant’s plow. region’s fields and feedlots therefore stay bound in a Gordian knot, conscious of the critical role they play in maintaining the nation’s vitality but limited in terms of their 25 26 abilities to control their own fates.

THE OLD MOUNTAINS THE OLD MOUNTAINS Sergei Rogachev Stanley D. Brunn

Low, monotonous, forest-covered mountains encircle the gloomy city, as if In the spring of its life, the valley in the Cumberland Plateau had a sucking it into the treacherous vortex of their topography. Or perhaps this hardwood forest so thick that light barely penetrated through to the ground. place, which emerged for the sole purpose of digging into the stone innards Oak, laurel, walnut, and maple trees grew on the green slopes, while of the mountains, is really burying itself alive in them. When the infrequent rhododendron and wild flame azaleas colored the underbrush. Here and sunshine is followed by long stormy periods, gray mists of poison belched there were dogwood and redbud trees. With summer came settlers from forth by industrial smokestacks smother the basin. As the smoke mixes the young nation’s east coast, most on their way somewhere else, but with fog and snowdrifts, it seems as if the treacherous quagmire of this some choosing to stay and try to farm the forest soils or cut the timber. mountain bog has swallowed up the city, its surrounding mines, sooty The town was founded in autumn times, self-reliant and isolated in its blast furnaces, and screeching machinery. Suddenly the snowy gloom is valley, nestled amid the ridges of the smokey mountains. Log cabins gave penetrated by shafts of light. But it is only searchlights on the perimeter of way to frame houses made of wood, laid out in a line along the valley floor. the city’s famous labor camp, where the son-in-law of the once omnipotent The coal companies came in early winter. They offered to buy rights to the Brezhnev paces among other fallen men of power. earth, and the people of the mountains sold their land cheaply. Soon, the These images are brush strokes for a portrait of Nizhniy Tagil - the city locals themselves were working for the companies, tunneling into the hills which many hold to be the quintessence of the Urals. The writer Mamin- and scraping out the black diamonds. But the pace was not fast enough, Sibiryak, who was born in the Urals and loved the region, said that Nizhniy and the companies began stripping away the very land to bring the coal Tagil is “the most dear child of the Urals, closest to its stone heart.” What out more cheaply and rush it off to places outside. Tall, gray slag heaps kind of region could give birth to such a child? What kind of place has a of coal and slate buried the forest, and the slopes became gashed and heart of stone? decapitated. The mountains and the people were old now, and in its late winter, the town was winding down. Measured in miles, the plateau was smack in the middle between the huge cities of the east and the rich central heartland; 1 2 and yet, was there any other place so alone or so far away? ~ N E R 0 E ~ 'II ·~= 0 H ~ I 0 ~ s ~ Columb~s R I A ~ E It 8 = S I 0 =0 Lexington lzhevsk. • = Berea• \) t-ta ~ y ~" = • • 't-" ~ • chelyablnsk - - - - ~~ ~ \)~ ~· ~ G , K AKHsrAN 0 K A Z =~

Birrll!ngham \ Atlant·l c ' O c ean 3 4 - THE URAL MOUNTAINS: NOT MUCH OF A BARRIER THE EASTERN MOUNTAINS: NO LONGER A BARRIER The Urals may be the most elderly young mountains on earth. Although geologically The old mountains of a young continent are found in Appalachia. In geography books, they are considered recent, a more accurate term is “rejuvenated.” Fresh tectonic uplift you may just as often see them called “plateaus” or “highlands,” reserving the term uncovered the base of more ancient mountains, exposing mineral riches accumulated “mountains” for the Rockies or Cascades. Yet in American history, the Appalachian over millennia. The region’s pioneers were startled with miraculous treasures that system represented a formidable barrier to westward migration. European-American seemed like easy pickings. In fact, they say that the first deposits were discovered when settlers, moving in from the coast, encountered the escarpment wall of the eastern side the wind blew down trees and revealed precious minerals right there on the roots. of Appalachia, and it must have seemed that this region was the mountains indeed, From those dead roots grew the quarries and ironworks which made the Urals famous stretching from the Canadian Maritimes all the way to northeastern Mississippi. later in the 18th century. Appalachia consists of several distinct echelons; the Blue Ridge Mountains, a very old While vernacular images of most Russian regions are somewhat vague, the Urals range of granitic mountains mostly in Virginia and North Carolina; a series of parallel provokes a definite, if somewhat unflattering response. When you ask someone “so, ridges and valleys from Pennsylvania to Alabama; and two plateaus, the Alleghany in what are these Urals?” the answer will be a prompt, “well, they’re mountains,” but the the north and Cumberland in the south. Today, a traveler through the old mountain word “mountains” would likely be blurted out with a hint of doubt - it’s not Mountains regions will not find them much trouble to cross, but may be touched by the way the with a capital “M” (the way people of the Russian flatlands speak of the Caucasus areas hang on to their beauty, with small towns nestled in the valleys, some huge areas and Pamirs with a combination of admiration and awe). The average elevation in the of what looked to be heavily forested and mined lands, and small farms, often crawling Urals is only about 3,000 feet, with the highest point at 5600 feet - hardly a mountain up the steep hillsides. It might be surprising to the motorist on the interstate highways climber’s challenge. Strong river erosion has hacked up the mountains, making them that now crisscross the mountains to realize how difficult an impediment they were in easily passable. Some rivers even defiantly flow westward, despite the fact that their the 18th century, a barrier that was both physical and psychological. It was not easy for sources are on the eastern slopes. Just as the rivers do not “notice” the Urals, the many early settlers on the eastern coast to consider migrating inland because there were passengers of the Trans-Siberian railroad who stream across the mountains in numbers too few easy routes. Even those gaps that permitted access across the mountains still barely know they’ve been over a range. The amount of actual climbing that the required vast amounts of energy and skill. trains have to do is only about 300 to 500 feet, a disappointingly easy victory for the When the settlement wave finally did breach the mountain passes, people flooded travellers, who then spread the disparaging image of mountains with a small “m.” And through, and the mountains gave way like a broken dam. As the country grew and yet, in modern spoken Russian, the very expression “beyond the Urals” is synonymous expanded, the mountains did not seem so tough to conquer anymore - in fact they with crossing a certain critical threshold. Stretching for about 2,000 miles almost seemed a little older every year. They seemed to get emptier too, like a shrunken shell of strictly north-south from the icefields of the northern Arctic Ocean to the deserts of their old self. Although in area the region is larger than California, its population pales 5 6 Kazakhstan, the Urals stand in the way of all routes to the east. Traversing these by comparison, as about half of Appalachians live in scattered rural areas. Where are all mountains is perceived as moving beyond a psychological frontier delimiting the Real the cities here? Why does the region seem “empty?” Russia. Until as late as the mid-twentieth century, the expression “from the Carpathians For early Americans who wanted to venture westward into the anticipated rich to the Urals” or “from the Baltic to the Urals” was used in Russia to denote the idea of agricultural interior, the Appalachians were viewed as a place to go through in order to the “tamed” and lived-in part of the state. get somewhere else. Early European frontier settlement in the late eighteenth century The Novgordians who first crossed the Urals in the 12th century in the quest for was confined to a few select roads, passes, and rivers. Three main routes through the Siberian furs called the mountains by the cold and cruel word “stone.” In doing so, mountain barrier were used: the forks of the Ohio River, the Cumberland Gap along they defined the character of the Urals not by its topography, but by the nature of its the southern edge of the Virginia/Kentucky border (what became the “Wilderness soil. This sterile land was too inhospitable for Russian peasants - the shoulders of the Road”), and the valley of East Tennessee. By 1800 the National Road went up the Urals reach into the Arctic, and the harshness of the north barrels down the cold stony Potomac to the Ohio. Many who traversed the mountains realized the opportunities backbone of the range far toward the south. The arriving Russians were accustomed to were few for large numbers, so most stopped briefly and went farther west into central the softness of the plain where sediments hid the rock, and found this alien, exposed Tennessee, the Kentucky Bluegrass, and Ohio, all places with better agricultural lands stone frightening. Maneuvering along river valleys, they hurried to reach the West that could support higher population densities. Those few who remained fashioned an Siberian Plain, a place that evoked images of the more familiar Russian flatlands. economy and livelihood strongly tied to timber and mining rather than agriculture. Therefore, although on a geologic map the Urals are a mountain range thrust between They also became increasingly bypassed by larger numbers of people moving into the two great plains, they have actually long been a type of trench on the map of Russian continent’s interior. In a sense they became isolated by choice from the major currents colonization: western Siberia on the other side of the mountains was settled before of economic change that were sweeping the country. the Urals themselves. Two well-settled and urbanized belts of piedmont preceded the Traversing any physical barrier is difficult, especially in times of slow transportation. development of the mountains proper. Defining the boundaries of the Old Mountains There was also fear of the strong Natuve American nations (Cherokee, Chickasaw, is therefore no easy task. and Choctaw) of southern Appalachia. Finally, the Appalachian system was a Today, western approaches to the Urals are controlled by two major administrative psychological barrier. Early explorers and veterans of military campaigns against the centers - Perm in the north and Ufa in the south, each of them gripping its respective Native Americans returned home with tales that there were few easy passages in and section of the Urals with a double-pronged fork of arterial railways. In pre- around this thousand- mile mountain system. Probably more than one settler was also revolutionary Russia the Urals region was governed from Perm and Ufa. Both cities fearful of the forested mountains; these were unfamiliar terrains to those who grew up grew beyond the narrow mining core of the Urals, as factories for the further processing in northern Europe and in the flat coastal plains. Few African-Americans settled in the of Uralian mineral resources emerged along the transport routes. It was as if the mining region, leaving it to become a stronghold of white Protestants. Despite the hazards, industry rolled off the slopes westward in a kind of economic debris flow, following the people from the east ventured into the mountains: Scots-Irish, English, French 7 8 stream of raw materials drawn from the Urals toward the main areas of consumption. Huguenots, Dutch, and Germans. They carried with them the independence of the As a result, the Urals as an industrial region is considerably tilted to the west with frontier and a disdain for authority. respect to its mountain backbone. THEME 1: AN ECONOMY AS WORN DOWN AS THE MOUNTAINS The contours of the Old Mountains as a social and cultural region were defined by the pattern of Russian settlement. Gradually widening its stream, population movement A Region Used Up crossed the Urals as a continuation of the original basis of the Russian eastward GHOSTS IN THE MOUNTAINS If the Old Mountains seemed a region off the beaten path - an area to be traversed and colonization - the Volga Basin. The eastern tributaries of the Volga (between the Kama A FOREBODING LANDSCAPE forgotten - they became a place of interest with the discovery of the rich coal resources and Samara Rivers) are like two beams of a slide projector which highlight the Russian- Russians who entered the Urals found ample of Appalachia. The people of the region were often all too willing to sell their land for reason to be scared of the unfamiliar rocky populated middle section. The overlap of this well-populated mid-section with the Americans in Appalachia found their own existing or speculative mineral value. Very quickly, outside companies obtained mineral ways to express the harsh and foreboding environment. Placenames left over from indige- narrow Uralian backbone (beyond which the wormholes of mines and quarries seldom rights to lands in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky. These were available mountain landscape in placenames which nous people even warned them about local dan- go) defines the quintessential Urals. Perm and Ufa have their counterparts within this gers: don't sit on the Devil's Stool or Satan's at cheap prices as much of the land was unused and had little value for agriculture. reflected hardships: "Needmore", trials: Armchair; don't settle the Devil's Campsite; ultimate Urals in the large cities of Ekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk. "Shooting Creek", or the eerie supernatural The beginnings of regional exploitation had arrived, in the sense that control of the atmosphere of the mountains: "Devil's Court- don't climb the Evil Mountain; don't trust properties and mines was by outsiders with little concern for the general welfare the ghostly light of darkness from the Moon's THEME 1: AN ECONOMY AS WORN DOWN AS THE MOUNTAINS house", "Talkin Rock", "Bone Valley". Pillar; and finally, a simple - "Yurma!" - Stay of the population or for the environments they were destroying to obtain fuel for Away!. A Region Used Up industrial America. It is small wonder that Appalachians felt maltreated by outsiders. A list of offenders would include those who made much money mining a product What magnet drew people into these gloomy mountains that had so long remained from the region, but took it out and invested little in Appalachia, those outsiders who empty? The question itself holds the answer - magnetic iron ore, abundant in the have a much higher standard of living because they burn cheap energy produced in Urals but absent among the sediments of the Russian plains. The mineral riches were Appalachia, and those who continue to see the region as beset with pressing economic fabulous: the city of Magnitogorsk derives its name from the mountain Magnitnaya and social problems, but steadfastly refuse to solve the root causes of the problems (Magnetic) which was one huge mass of rich iron ore. Today the mountain is mere identified by government reports and scholars during the 1930s and again in the 1960s. memory preserved in a local pun that neatly sums up the whole fate of the Urals: “It These include high unemployment and underemployment (sometimes reaching 40 once was a Mountain Steep, now it’s a pit deep” [it sounds better in Russian - “Byla percent), acute rural poverty, dated industrial infrastructures, marginal agricultural gora vysokaya - stala yama glubokaya”]. The effects of eroding action of milennia of economies, low education levels and inferior quality schools, poor job skills, an aging geologic time pale in comparison with what economic time has wrought in a wink, as population, poor health standards, and inaccessibility to vital human services. iron mining pitilessly chewed away the mountains.

9 10 Before the Urals were tapped for resources, the Russian ferrous metals industry relied Coal mining remains the major industry in Appalachia. Kentucky, West Virginia, on deposits of bog ores with low iron content. The deposits of the Urals were far and Pennsylvania still produce about 40 percent of the bituminous coal of the United superior and were combined with an abundance of forests for burninig charcoal -- a States. Other minerals mined in the region include limestone, feldspar, and oil. Coal true technological paradise for ironworking of that day. In the 18th-19th centuries, the was discovered in Appalachia in the 18th century, but became important when the technological advantages for the industry in the Urals clearly outweighed the locational industrial revolution started in earnest during the latter part of the last century and disadvantage of great distance from consuming areas. Even British industry at the time steel industries required vast amounts of coal. Engineering and geology teams from of Industrial Revolution heavily relied on imported Uralian pig iron. The industrial major steel companies in the Northeast ferreted out the sites of rich coal seams in development of the Urals took place simultaneously with the militarization of Russia’s Appalachia. But coal is a cyclical industry: times of high industrial demand give way economy that started with Peter the Great’s wars. By gearing Uralian industry to to dips when unemployment rises. During hard times young and middle-aged miners military needs the centralized Russian state reforged the region’s mineral wealth into its and their families may migrate to nearby Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Knoxville hoping territorial acquisitions. to find work. When the mines re-open, the workers often return home to work in the mines once again. Yet for all its importance, the Old Mountains region has always been a loser with respect to the interregional balance of national income. Both before and after the The human face of coal mining is partly reflected in the story of coal miners and revolution, it sent out more wealth than it took in, and the economic history of the their strikes and stoppages, sometimes violent and bloody. The story is also seen in region is one of exploitation for the benefit of people from the outside. Industrial the places where miners lived, coal mining towns which had a familiar appearance: magnates turned pig iron, gold, and precious stones into a means for satisfying their rows of shotgun houses at the bottom of valleys (houses laid out straight from front own desires, regardless of the interests of the region: building mansions in St Petersburg to back, where it is said you could fire a shotgun into the living room and the shell or buying castles in Europe. “Be grateful at last: turn your attention to this part of would go through every room and out the back door), an occasional church (often of a the world which has adorned the whole world with the best amethysts on earth!” European ethnic group brought in to mine the coal), and the most ostentatious houses passionately implored artist Denisov-Ural’skiy at the end of the 19th century, but in of mine owners and officials on hillsides overlooking the settlement. Despite the early vain. Repelled by the stone heart of the Urals, entrepreneurs who made their fortunes unionization of miners that helped improve labor conditions and incomes, glaring in the region could hardly resist the temptation to become absentee-magnates. contrasts of wealth and poverty persist. An explosive example of class tensions in the area can be seen in Harlan County, Kentucky; one of the richest in the United States in State intervention also revived the military role of the region. Many defense industries terms of mineral profits, yet so poor in terms of per capita incomes that it went down were evacuated from the central regions of the country during the Second World War. in history as “Bloody Harlan” of miners’ revolts in the 1930s. Just as in Peter the Great’s day, the Urals became the second echelon of defense for the country, a line of “industrial trenches” running parallel to the German front. A third of Many a coal mining town is indeed dismal, depressing, and an unhealthy place to live. the country’s arms were produced here, including tanks (Nizhniy Tagil and Temperature inversions were not unusual in these valley settlements, and the dust 11 12 Chelyabinsk), military transport equipment (Miass), and chemical weapons. from the mines was in the air one breathed, in the food one grew and ate, in the clean After the war, the region began to produce nuclear warheads (near Chelyabinsk) clothes one wore, and even inside the house. In the mines themselves, health and safety and bacteriological weapons (Ekaterinburg). Far from the prying eyes of western problems lurked. Machinery was dangerous, roof supports were unstable, dynamiting intelligence-gathering, the Urals became an area of absolute secrecy. was reckless, and the all-pervasive coal stifled the lungs of workers through ten- and twelve-hour shifts. It was not unusual to have explosions, roof support collapses, The Soviet galvanization of the nearly stiffened corpse of the antiquated industrial and machinery accidents that resulted in loss of limbs. More silent were the deaths region had considerably worsened the unattractive features of the Urals, that repelled attributed to those who worked forty or fifty years or more in the mines and developed people even when the region was young. Mounds of tailings, unusable by-products black lung disease. Those victims represent part of the social and health costs associated from mining, pockmarked the face of the region, the stagnant air of intermontane with years of working to produce energy for the nation’s factories and utilities. basins filled with pollutants, and the shallow rivers lost the struggle to flush out polluted water. Such then was the fate of the Urals - from lofty heights to the abysses Equally as destructive as the toll of human life has been what the coal economies have of worked out quarries; from the modest flames of early furnaces to the endless fire of done to the environment. People welcomed early coal mining in Appalachia because radioactivity. Ernst Neizvestniy, a Urals-born sculptor, has designed a monument in it provided a dependable source of income, certainly much more than timber industry Ekaterinburg to victims of the Stalin repression. It features two sobbing faces: Europe, or eking out a survival existence from marginal and submarginal agricultural lands. shedding tears in the direction of Asia, and Asia in turn crying for Europe. There is a Mining was seen as beneficial, and jobs and environmental quality were considered real grief in this heart of stone - this is the region that sacrificed itself at the altar of the separately. Hillsides were being eaten away by huge machines, mountain tops were Motherland. being removed and flattened to provide easier access to minable seams of quality coal, rivers and streams were turning ugly shades of yellows and browns, and the air was A Region Propped Up unfit to breathe. Land reclamation is now required after strip mining, but accusations of inefficient and half-hearted efforts still abound. It would not be enough to say of the industrial Urals that it is merely an old region - it is an area of downright antiques. With a mixture of historian’s pride and economist’s A Region Propped Up sadness, guides will show a visitor industrial buildings constructed in the 18th century that still perform their original function. In almost any settlement people remember The Old Mountains have been identified as a problem region far back in American seeing the demolition of the last blast furnace or mechanical press built at the time history, when even Abraham Lincoln called for economic assistance to Appalachia. of the 18th century Demidov magnates. Uralian cities look like the untidy and Numerous federal and state policies and programs have been implemented to try to end disorganized display cases of a regional museum of technology, where antedeluvial some of these problems, but the issues seem to persist. factory buildings rub shoulders with industrial giants hastily built in the fever of the pre-war years and scattered specimens from the piecemeal modernization of the post- 13 14 war period. The Old Mountains were never able to accumulate enough capital to afford The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was created to resolve a host of rural problems in the luxury of rejuvenation. Big investment was directed there only during turning the southern Appalachians. In May of 1933 the authority was established by federal law points of history: Peter the Great’s perestroika of Russia in the early 18th century, “to improve navigation and provide flood control of the Tennessee River,” as well as to Russia’s European wars in the late 18th century, the war with Nazi Germany, and deal with reforestation, encourage use of marginal lands, and help develop agriculture later the peak of the Cold War. Investment was always limited to the barest minimum and industry in the Tennessee Valley. The people of the area at the time had incomes necessary for immediate returns on capital, and was exclusively concentrated in the less than 45 percent of the national average. The 1940s was a big growth period for material sphere of production. the TVA as dam construction and electricity generation became the cornerstones of its various projects. In 1933, only 3 percent of the farms in the valley had electric power; If in the past the mountains tolerated the plunder of their seemingly endless by 1950, the number approached 80 percent. treasurehouse, now the steamshovels no longer dig into thick layers of minerals, but scrape the very bones of the exposed mountain skeleton. When mining development The TVA, however, was a top-down project, a child of the Roosevelt era designed to started, ores with about 66 percent iron content were worked, but now even 17percent show what big government was capable of achieving. In a later attempt to improve the content ore is regarded as a lucky find. The metallurgical industry in the region is no region’s economy through more local approaches, the American government created longer a link in the technological chain converting Asian raw materials into European the Appalachian Regional Commission in the 1960s across the thirteen states that products. contained portions of Appalachia. A host of programs were carried out with federal and state cooperation. Local and civic groups benefitted from the almost $6 billion of The industrial structure of the Urals, with a preponderance of the obsolete smokestack investment. Improved housing, job training, health services, transportation networks industry, will continue to handicap its future development. The conversion of military (in the early years of the program most money went into roads), and educational industries has already dealt the region an extremely painful blow. This poorly planned programs were but a few of the efforts to raise the region’s standard of living and quality process cut to the quick the very foundations of the economy in many major cities. of life. There is little doubt that complete victory of the free-market economy in Russia will again spell death for the Urals, already suffering from the shift of investment Government efforts to resolve the nagging human problems of Appalachia have met from heavy industry to the consumer products sector. But the Urals is not an empty with some successes. New schools, clinics, libraries, bridges, small town airports, backwater that could weather the storm by living on social security. Today, the region industrial parks and shopping centers represent part of the newly built landscape in the ranks second only to the Core in terms of industrial output. The size of the region’s region. Programs for job retraining, training local health professionals, small business population (about 13 million people) rules out a hands-off approach to its problems. development, and environmental cleanup abound. These projects, small or large, visible As in no other region, the future of the Uralian economy, which had been saved by or invisible, are funded not only with government money, but also by churches, unions, state intervention in the past, depends on the political course of the country. and philanthropic organizations, many of the same groups that invested in human welfare last century. Volunteers from outside Appalachia continue to contribute time 15 16 THEME 2: A CULTURE WALLED UP IN THE MOUNTAINS and money to try and correct local problems. But in spite of these visible changes and successes in alleviating pressing human problems, the region remains poor, worn out, The pioneers who entered the mountains filled in the void left behind by more and neglected. Perhaps Appalachia has little political clout because it has few people enterprising migrants en route to Siberia. The oldest Russian inhabitants of the scattered in rural areas in a dozen states; in a predominantly urban nation, where most mountains are Old Believers, who fled from governmental and Church persecution and voters live in cities, it is difficult to obtain federal and state funding and support for intolerance in European Russia and found in the narrow river valleys of the Urals their problematic rural regions. The “neglected” and “bypassed” nature of the region two burrow for hiding. Later, the population was largely formed from the ranks of “called hundred years ago still seems applicable today. up” people: destitutes unable to control their own fate who surrendered themselves to government agents recruiting for the factories of the Urals. The agents would “call up” THEME 2: A CULTURE WALLED UP IN THE MOUNTAINS these unfortunate souls at the bazaars - volunteers, yes, but then locked into a kind of industrial serfdom. The construction of factories in the Urals went hand-in-hand with The isolation of the people of the Old Mountains created a culture that became a the importation of serf peasants and the use of free settlers, who were “attached” to living museum of American traditions. But while people who know how to build a factories, fully dependent on the mining administration. This industrial serfdom was wooden spinning wheel and construct a log cabin from scratch may still be found accompanied by other forms of forced settlement: exile and imprisonment. The region here, the uniqueness of the culture came at the price of education levels lower than had no shortage of prisons, among them some of the best known in Russia: the Nizhniy national averages, poor access to ideas from the “outside,” and a kind of siege mentality Tagil labor camp, designed for formerly high ranking state officials, and Perm Camp, of regional pride. Jack Weller (who wrote about the region in Yesterday’s People: with the dubious distinction of being the most feared in the country. In the Soviet Life in Contemporary Appalachia) noted that such characteristics as traditionalism, period, new migration flows into the Urals followed the age-old model of the “called independence, and fatalism seem to imbue the culture of the mountains. up” people: contract laborers and the idealistic Komsomol youth, lured into sacrificing It is little wonder that fatalism and fatalistic religions have support in coal-dependent their best years “building Communism” out in the hinterland. Thus the settling of the economies, as many a mining community has experienced the human toll of coal Old Mountains took place in the passive mode: strong personalities with enough will to mining; a walk through a local cemetery would show numbers who died the same act independently seemed to avoid the area. How vastly different this type of settlement day, many at very early ages. The number of families without fathers and husbands in is from the pattern of the Russian Breadbasket steppes and even Siberia, where free mining towns shows the human tragedy of coal mining. The people of the region also pioneer settlements preceded government efforts. While self-reliant personalities bravely had good reason to fear the outside world. Although the outsiders brought in capital ventured into new frontiers, the more passive or outcasts allowed themselves to be to invest in the coal industry, they also took advantage of the local peoples’ lack of squeezed into the stony dungeons of the Urals’ canyons, mines, and sweatshops. If you sophistication to win mining rights cheaply. The federal government told them that want to call someone a hick in Russia, you may say “What is it with you? Are you from their stills, representing years of traditional conversion of corn to “white lightin’” were the Urals?” suddenly illegal. The outsiders brought or lured in many miners. The immigration 17 18 Russians did not feel quite at home in the Urals, and they felt that hostile forces still histories of the 1880s and thereafter reveal large numbers from central and eastern lurked in the land beneath their feet, as if they lived on the back of a huge, sleeping Europe who were enticed to America to work in coal mines. Some African Americans And as the children looked, the "...there came a big old giant step- man was no more; what had been dragon. Reptilian images were always associated with the Urals. Even in ancient were also brought into coal mines, for example, in southeastern Kentucky. pin' right up the mountain. Had him the upper part of his body turned Russian folklore, the monster dragon “Zmey Gorynych” was thought to have his lair For Americans who do not know the region well, its image is mostly negative as they a pipe about four foot long, and he into an enormous head, and the in the Urals. (“Gorynych” in Russian can relate to both the terms “gora” for mountains had a long blue beard that dragged lower part, from the waist down, associate the area with prolonged poverty, acute social problems, problems with the and “gorye” for grief). The best-known writer of the Urals, Paul Bazhov, who drew on the ground. When Will saw became a neck...and the neck was a law, and a hostility to strangers born of historical isolation from events on the more from local folklore, peopled his mountain tales with myriads of tiny gorynyches - the old giant was headed right for snake's neck. And out of the earth dynamic east coast and Middle West. Popular television programs poking fun at the house, he ran and got behind coiled the body of an enormous magical lizards who formed the retinue of the Queen of Copper Mountain (the most Appalachians (“Beverly Hillbillies”) have contributed to the stereotypes, which survived the door, pulled it back on him and snake, so large that the head reared purely Uralian personage of Russian literature). Many young gem-seekers were lured by in part because of the “bypassed” nature of the region. But to the insider of the Old scrouged back against the wall a- higher than the tallest trees of the the cruel flirtation of this ice queen of the mountain and driven to death. shakin' like a leaf...Old Fire Draga- forest...Semyonich said to the Mountains, isolation and inaccessibility represent a positive part of their heritage. The man came on up, eat ever'thing boys, 'That was Poloz the Great Warmth seeped out of the people held in the stony embrace of the Urals, until even same streak of self-reliance that led their ancestors to tackle the harsh environment of there was on the table, sopped the Snake. He has all the gold in his their souls seemed cold as the stone. The folk tales of the Urals shock the reader who the hills may have created a certain shyness and conscious withdrawal from exterior plates, and licked out all the pots. power. Wherever he goes, the gold has been steeped in the tradition of mainstream Russian folklore. What is jarring is influences. It was almost as if the region became an island surrounded by seas that were Lit his old pipe and pulled down follows. He can go on the surface the blurred lines between good and evil and the sense that people’s lives are controlled constantly experiencing changes. the holler, the black smoke a-rollin' of the earth or under it, whichever by fatal and heartless forces. Another tragic theme, forming common threads in many like comin' out a chimley. Hit was a he likes.' The mountain people were devising their own ways to entertain, to express themselves, Uralian tales, is the deficit of inspiration. “Worn out” is the regional dialect term best sight to look at." and to survive in a harsh environment. Isolation helped preserve the cultural traditions. ~Pavel Bazhov, The Malachite describing the physical and moral condition of workers in leading industries of the area. ~Richard Chase, ed., The Jack Casket: Tales from the Urals Balladeers traveled the mountains and celebrated folk stories in song. Dulcimers, Tales, Houghton Mifflin Co., (translation by Alan Moray Wil- Nationally-significant culture could not have bloomed from the cold stone of the banjos, and fiddles were made of locally available materials such as oak, creating fine Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1943, liams), Hutchinson & Co., Ltd., Urals. Throughout their history, the Ural Mountains have not given Russian culture a instruments which may survive to this day. Many of the country’s major musical pp. 107-108 "Old Fire Dragaman" London, NY, Melbourne, Syd- single passionate poet, deep thinker, painter or composer of national fame; it did not developments of this century, from blues to country to jazz, had southern origins. ney, pp. 110-111 "The Great nurture great examples of monastic ascetism or saintliness. Instead, it generated a whole Country music emerged mostly from the southern Appalachian highlands but has Snake" constellation of technicians and inventors, representatives of professions demanding become perhaps the standard music of the South and, increasingly, of the entire cold, calculating, reasoning minds. The Urals were home to innovators in various country. Since the 1920s, radio dispersed the knowledge of Appalachian music outside branches of technology: railroad builders, the inventor of the Russian steam engine, the the region, introduced the term “mountain barndance” into the American vocabulary, inventor of radio, and the mastermind of Soviet nuclear programs (Kurchatov). Even and publicized the songs, humor, and dialogue associated with the region. Many well the better known cultural figures of the region, who seem to have overcome the tenets known Country and Bluegrass musicians can trace their personal roots and origins of of pragmatism, find the dubious titles “Uralian writer” or “Uralian artist” hanging over their music to the region, especially to the central and southern Appalachians. 19 20 their heads. These labels implicitly deny them the “All-Russian-ness” of full-fledged Popular forms of entertainment even among early settlers were music and story national fame. Whereas the focus of truly Russian writers has always been on the telling, both of which required little or no formal schooling. Legends and ghost stories eternal Faustian dilemmas of humanity, those in the Urals were more parochial, were spun in the tradition of the Scots-Irish; this was not only a way for parents and limiting their work to purely regional topics such as the daily life of factories, the grandparents to convey personal and family histories, but also to regale children. It folklore of prospectors, or descriptions of mountain landscapes. Only in sculpture did has only been during the past several decades that these so-called “jack tales,” often artists of the Urals breach the confines of purely regional fame and achieve renown all humorous stories about politicians, lawyers, and favorite town drunkards, have over Russia, perhaps inspired by the three-dimensionality of the mountains. been collected from older generations. Valuable information has been gathered in recent years through a project known as “Foxfire,” founded by Elliot Wigginton, The Old Mountains has always been a region out of sync with time and surrounding a school teacher in northern Georgia. He started a magazine with his students in space: a mountain barrier between Europe and Asia which was really no barrier at all, the 1960s which encouraged them to mine the hills, but not for coal this time: the a forgotten place jumped over by voluntary settlers, but later populated by people not children interviewed members of their community and tapped into a treasure-trove wanted elsewhere, a place impoverished despite its own riches, looking only inward-still of information on local culture: stories, instructions on cooking wild plants, and held captive by the monster Gorynych, but safe in the isolation of its mountain box. building log cabins, and a wealth of crafts from the Old Mountains. The Appalachian region has long been associated with “home made” items, be they pottery, tables, chairs, music instruments, dolls, toys, or quilts. Today, members of a new generation of Appalachian craftspeople have arisen, often living in artisans’ communities (such as Berea, Kentucky), and traveling to a series of crafts and antique fairs and exhibitions throughout America. The crafts industry thus represents a mix of “old and new” Appalachia. And while not employing large numbers of employees or generating huge sums of income for the region, these low-technology ventures are an integral part of the Appalachian cultural landscape. Tradition is an appropriate term to describe the peoples of Appalachia. It is not difficult to understand the strong sense of pride and identity the residents have to their region, nor to understand why many people believe that the region has changed little for the better in recent decades.

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THE TROPICAL SOUTH THE TROPICAL SOUTH Raymond Krishchyunas Wilbur Zelinsky

Flying into the seaside city of Batumi from Moscow in January may be What a difference a few centuries can make or the vagaries of weather! If a shock. With ice-bound Moscow only two hours behind, disembarking the wind had shifted just a bit in direction in October 1492, Mr. Columbus passengers are enveloped with warm air and a sea of greenery that seem might well have waded ashore somewhere near Daytona Beach instead to defy winter. The road to town runs past plantations of fragrant tangerine of onto one of the least impressive isles in the Bahamas. Such a brush trees laden with bright orange fruit. Sprawling two-story private houses with the North American continent would not have been too encouraging with surrounding verandas, grand staircases, and fancy cast iron gates sit for someone with the mercenary appetites of the Great Navigator. Beyond amidst orchards and flower gardens. For a visitor from Russia these are real a coastline blocked by a succession of sandbars and having virtually no villas. The streets are jammed with disorderly hosts of private cars and lined decent natural harbors, he would have seen endlessly flat, steamy, mucky with stately and exotic trees. terrain of questionable fertility and few resources. It is off-season, and crowds milling in the streets and city bazaars Yet five hundred years later, nowhere else in the world is there anything like are blessedly free of tourists. The colorful look and sound of the the seemingly endless East Florida conurbation, a narrow, uninterrupted people instantly evoke the image of cosmopolitan ports of the eastern strip of grandiose urban tissue reaching all the way from Miami’s southern Mediterranean: Here Georgians, Russians, Armenians, Greeks, and Turks all suburbs northward to Jacksonville for a distance of nearly 400 miles. mix together. Even a newcomer unable to distinguish between most non- Where Federal or state regulations or the physical limitations of the European peoples will soon notice that many Georgians speak Georgian coastal zone do not discourage it, the same sort of hodgepodge of hotels, curiously intermingled with Russian words, and many who speak Georgian condominiums, resorts, marinas, fast food outlets, shopping centers, are not of dark Mediterranean complexion, but blue-eyed redheads - and parking lots that make up the modern American city seems to be native Muslim Adzharians from the mountains towering above the city. materializing along Florida’s west coast. Wearing skullcaps and fingering amber prayer beads, old Adzharians linger The transformation of peninsular Florida and so much of the Gulf Coast in smoke-filled coffee houses that cluster in the port area amidst quaint in the 20th Century has been amazing, a Cinderella story verging upon a blocks of turn-of-the century modern art townhouse, relics of Batumi’s geographic miracle. 1 glorious past as a booming free port. 2 ~ fS' u ~ TEXAS

A s Beaumont =0 R U S • Atlantic ~ Ocean Krasnodar ~ • u~ •...-f Orlando • ~ Lakeland Guzr or M • • 0 ex i c 0 Winter H B 1 a c k 5 e a ~ FlORIDA

0 200 - miles - Key West . ~·~ - 3 4 - FROM BACKWATER TO NOUVEAUX RICHES A LATE BLOOMER For the most part the Tropical South consists of a narrow strip of the coast squeezed For a surprisingly long time, Florida remained one of the orphan regions of the between the sea and the mountains. Though tiny on the map, the region can Western World. Even in 1892, anyone surveying the area would have noted remarkably rightfully boast of an ancient history and a role far out of proportion to its small little change from the time of Columbus, especially in comparison with the rest of the area. Almost completely enclosed, the Black Sea is in many ways an appendage and a bustling republic farther north. The Gulf Coast fared somewhat better. Control of the smaller version of the Mediterranean. Since the seventh century B.C., Greek colonies mouth of the immense Mississippi, and thus of the wealth and commerce of its vast dotted the shores of the Pontus Ekvsinos - the Hospitable Sea - making the straits of drainage basin, excited interest among the French in the early 1700s, the Spanish a Bosporus and Daradanelles one of the world’s busiest waterways. The Mediterranean little later, and subsequently the Anglos. From its earliest days, New Orleans became a connection was maintained as the coasts became part of consecutive empires focused on prize worth jousting over. Constantinople: Roman, Byzantine, and finally, Ottoman. All of them embraced the Lacking any hinterland worth bothering about, coastal Florida was neglected; aside Black Sea with two narrow arms of coastal footholds. Until a century or two ago, the from a token, poorly provisioned garrison at St. Augustine, a few small, ineffective political and ethnic history of this coastal ring was quite separate from the hinterland, coastal and inland church missions, and a scattering of place names, the Spanish making it a beachhead of the Mediterranean-Balkan realm. Under Ottoman rule, the impress was negligible. The only perceived value was geopolitical: as a staging area for coasts were strongly Islamized and faced off against Christian Georgia and Russia. naval and military efforts to keep marauders out of West Indian waters, the source In the words of the famous Prince Potyomkin, Crimea was “a wart on Russia’s nose.” of so much European wealth, the region where all the real action was taking place. The Hospitable sea of the Greeks was the ominously Black sea of Muslim threat for Simply because of its location, the French and British intermittently challenged Spanish the Russians. The Islamic beachhead proved to be precarious, though, as Russia took sovereignty over Florida, and when the United States finally scooped up the state from over the coasts in late 18th to early 19th century, turning the region that had been the an enfeebled Spain around 1819, the transaction was almost absentminded and stirred periphery of Mediterranean empires into the “South” from a Russian perspective. little political interest among the American populace. Furthermore, over the next And yet, the region until the twentieth century was a sleepy and nearly unpopulated several decades settlement and development remained minimal in the southern two backwater. Surrounding states were uninterested in the Black Sea except in terms of thirds of the state. During the same period, the only notable growth in activity along strategic value. The accounts of travelers who moved through western Georgia a mere the Gulf Coast was in New Orleans and a few other port towns. Elsewhere, populations hundred years ago speak of the unimaginable poverty and primitive lifestyle of the were sparse and economic enterprise was stunted and desultory. As for the indigenous peasants: in a sense, the tradition of slavery continued in Western Georgia until 1912. inhabitants, which probably numbered in the hundreds of thousands, most had perished during the first century of direct and indirect contact with Europeans, chiefly In an amazing turn of fortune, the region that in the past epitomized poverty has been because of susceptibility to Old World diseases. miraculously transformed in modern times. Dense forests and swamps with a scattering 5 6 of cornfields have given way to vineyards, citrus and tea gardens, and huge sprawling Other factors account for the prolonged somnolence of the American Tropical South: villages of two or three storied private houses. Cars replaced the recently ubiquitous until the 20th Century, such places were not readily accessible nor environmentally water buffalos; and in the rate of private car ownership, the coastal strip from Crimea to appealing to Europeans who tended to gravitate to habitats that were reasonably Georgia ranked at the top during the Soviet period. Waterfronts have been transformed homelike, and the Tropical South was emphatically not like Europe. Even the into almost uninterrupted lines of resorts. The children and grandchildren of poor Spaniards, who did colonize various tracts within the American low latitudes, kept docile peasants now ostentatiously display their wealth in the expensive restaurants of to the temperate uplands and shunned the hot and wet coastal plains. Americans Moscow or Petersburg inaccessible to most Russians. Ironically, the Russians, who have considered southern Florida to be a wild and dangerous place, definitely not worth good reason to believe that much of this prosperity is at their expense, still perceive visiting, much less living in. At the time of Census of 1830, Florida ranked 25th the region through a distorting veil. The condescending romanticization of colorful among the 27 states and territories, having only 34,730 inhabitants, and nearly all of (“Italian”) southern poverty has been replaced with envious admiration of the region’s them living outside our region within the northern quarter of the state, an area that, in loud prosperity. The dramatic about-face in the prosperity of the Tropical South came terms of economy and culture, was little more than an extension of Georgia. Even as about through social and economic changes that occurred in what might be called the late as 1876, the entire voting population of what are now Dade, Broward, and Palm Soviet Frost Belt (which pretty much coincided with all of Russia). Improved standards Beach counties was only 73. In an incredible change, the statewide population tally of living in the North resulted in a greater appreciation of leisure and “tropical” for Florida by 1990 had reached 12,938,000, a figure surpassed only by California, amenities, creating a uniquely Soviet variety of Sunbelt. The environment closest to New York, and Texas; and the great bulk of these people were located in the peninsular tropical could be found along the rim of the Black Sea, and what the region lacked in section of the state. genuine “tropicalness” could be added by manipulating popular perception. How did this neglected region achieve such an amazing transformation in popularity? Tropiki Miami, Orlando, Tampa St. Petersburg, and New Orleans have experienced a localized expression of much broader trends operating among highly advanced modern societies Strictly speaking, the “Tropical” South is really only subtropical, but even that is everywhere: millions of middle-class people now enjoy a surplus of leisure time. But amazing so far to the north. In fact, the region embraces the world’s northernmost also relevant is what might be called the Tropicalization of American Life. For most point of subtropical climate. Moldova lies at the same latitude as Newfoundland, and persons, the summer season has become the emotional climax of the year. And, of Batumi (in the southernmost extremity of the region) corresponds to New York City, course, the best way to accommodate the lure of the tropics is to move southward for a though its climate is that of northern Florida. This anomaly is due to the protective few days - or better yet, for a lifetime. mountain wall which screens the coastal rim from invasions of cold air. The Greater Caucasus Range and the Crimean mountains provide a sharp divide between the Tropic-ana Tropical South and the steppes of the Breadbasket with their harsh winters. Weather Climate is a key consideration in explaining the metamorphosis of the Tropical South. 7 forecasts and tourist brochures always treat the region as a separate entity, calling it 8 Year round warmth and abundant sunshine have been powerful enticements for “The Black Sea Coast of Crimea and Caucasus.” The part of the region that fits closest Americans. But warmth is only a relative thing in a region for which the term “tropical” to the stereotypical images of the tropics, is Adzharia, a small area blessed with a is something of a misnomer. True enough, the mean daily maximum temperature may second line of mountain defenses against northern air. The Lesser Caucasus Mountains range near or above 90oF in the summer over virtually the entire region and is in the At Oreanda they sat on a seat not Her mind had bound me round. The far from the church, looked down at trap moisture-laden winds coming over the Black Sea, showering Batumi with well neighborhood of 70oF in January. On the other hand, there is no mountain barrier palms were hot the sea, and were silent. Yalta was over 80 inches of rain per year. Such a greenhouse climate gives this unique area lush between the Canadian Arctic and the Gulf of Mexico to block the bursts of intensely As if I lived in ashen ground, as if hardly visible through the morning flora resembling southern Japan or China. From Adzharia, the zone of humid climate refrigerated winter air masses that do occasionally invade the region. The leaves in which the wind kept up its mist; white clouds stood motionless continues into the triangle of the once nearly impassable and desolate swamps of sound Consequently, killing frosts occur along the entirety of the Gulf Coast in many winters, From my North of cold whistled in a on the mountain-tops. The leaves Colchida, and these are the only parts of the former USSR where the cultivation of did not stir on the trees, grasshop- and every few years all of Florida as far south as Miami endures freezing weather. sepulchral South, such “exotic” crops as tea and citrus fruits was possible. From Abkhazia to the Crimea, pers chirruped, and the monoto- This phenomenon is no small matter for a region that banks on the influx of visitors Her South of pine and coral and coraline the climate is much drier, and the landscapes with their Italian pines, cypress trees, and sea, nous hollow sound of the sea rising during the cold months, where central heating is almost unknown, and so much of up from below, spoke of the peace, dry-leafed bushes evoke images of the French Riviera and Italy, while the major crops Her home, not mine, in the ever-freshened the agricultural economy depends on frost sensitive crops such as citrus, tomatoes, and of the eternal sleep awaiting us. are grapes and tobacco. Keys, So it must have sounded when sugar cane. Even the very warmth that draws people can also cause problems. Relative Her days, her oceanic nights, calling there was no Yalta, no Oreanda The subtropics are a rather conjured-up tropics. Although all of the region has January humidity is often so high as to cause “super tropical” discomfort. For music, for whispering from the reefs. here. temperatures above the freezing point, on occasion winter frosts are strong enough to If this is a relatively warm corner of the North American continent, it is even more ~ Wallace Stevens, "Farewell to Florida", harm citrus trees. Snow occurs almost every year, though it seldom lasts for more than ~ Anton Chekhov, "The Lady emphatically one of its moistest, with mean annual precipitation up to 60 inches per collected poems 1955 from Ideas of a few days. More importantly, the Tropical South is a bit contrived with respect to its With The Dog", translation by year. It would seem that drought could not be an issue, but serious rainfall deficits may Order image. No other region of the USSR had a portrait that was so recently and consciously Constance Garnett, the Ecco occur over periods of several months in just about any portion of the region; and in Press, p. 12 manufactured by agents ranging from Russian literature to Soviet media and recent times, drought has been particularly troublesome in southern Florida. Such dry mass-culture. spells have meant near disaster for aquatic and other wildlife as well as for farmers and In earlier days, the “tropiki” had been ignored: Russian nobility’s quest for the exotic municipal water supplies. On the other hand, numerous floods have punctuated the was satisfied by trips to the Mediterranean, and Russian writers’ thirst for the romantic history of the region, especially along the Gulf. was quenched by the mountains of the Caucasus, where gallant montagnards resisted To add to this meteorological stew, the Tropical South experiences the most the Empire for nearly a century. Only in the 20th century did the growing middle thunderstorms of anyplace in North America, more than 100 days of such showers class of capitalist Russia discover the Black Sea as an affordable Russian Mediterranean. in an average year in southern Florida. With alarming frequency, settlements and Villas, health resorts (sanitoriums), and hotels for sun-deprived Petersburgians began to farmlands have been inundated in southern Louisiana, Texas, and Alabama. The dot the coast. A new infatuation by Russian writers with the romantic South began to situation is particularly worrisome along the lower Mississippi, and it has been only focus on the sea. Later the group of early Soviet writers hailing from Odessa portrayed 9 10 the Black Sea as an invented world of romanticized tropics, with bright colors and after herculean exploits and vast expense that the U.S. Corps of Engineers has been able noble characters with strong passions. This conscious desire to find a bright make- to safeguard New Orleans and other riverside towns from calamity. Another distinctive believe world amidst bleak Soviet realities explains much of the willing self-deception regional weather characteristic is a most unhappy one - tropical hurricanes. During the about the “Russian Tropics.” summer and autumn of almost any year, at least one of these potentially devastating storms sweeps in from the lower latitudes of the Atlantic Ocean to lash the Gulf or Under Stalin, an ethnic Georgian, the image of the Tropical South was particularly South Atlantic coast. It is not only the ferociously destructive winds that make these enhanced by official propaganda keen to accommodate the dictator’s tastes. In visitors so unwelcome. The accompanying vast surges of sea water that can rush over Soviet “factory of dreams” movies, the region became the locale for the “all-union low lying coastal tracts may cause even greater havoc. As construction and population health station” (offered as a boon to the best workers) and the land of romance and buildup continues at a merry pace (especially in Florida) in close proximity to the chivalry. Some former dachas of the nobility were indeed turned into sanatoriums and shore, it is all too likely that the worst of hurricane disasters is still to come on that resthouses for the workers, but more importantly, Stalin added to the old royal villas in fateful day when a storm of exceptional viciousness hits a densely settled area lacking the Crimea a whole network of dachas for the new communist rulers of the country, adequate evacuation plans or facilities. Something close to such an ultimate disaster and the region continued to be a playground for the elite. came to pass in 1992, when Hurricane Andrew laid waste to much of Miami’s southern By the 1960s, the mythological foundations were laid and the stage was set for the real periphery. opening of the Tropical South, which occurred with major changes in post-Stalinist How did this bundle of atmospheric contradictions come to attract one of the biggest Soviet society. Considerably improved standards of living produced a new urban middle population flows in recent history? Perhaps the answer lies within the realm of social class of educated professionals who valued leisure and were eager to fulfill the socially psychology. During the past several decades, there has been a remarkable shift in our prestigious aspirations earlier denied to everybody but the elite. The floodgates opened, collective and individual mind sets. Work has become little more than the prelude and the avalanche of tourists and vacationers quickly followed. to play, so that many of us spend our hours in shop or office daydreaming about weekends, vacations, or retirement. Everywhere one turns it seems that hedonism is The Tangerine Invasion Of Moscow rearing its lovely head, and the doctrines of pleasure and fun have begun to mold our The integration of the Tropical South into the Russian mainstream fully transformed destinies. What has emerged is a type of social Tropic-ana, born out of the key role that the region’s agriculture. Even before the revolution, the first tea gardens were laid out the advertising industry played in forging the region’s image: not too coincidentally, around Batumi, and the famous Botanical Gardens were established north of the town advertising came of age at the same time that modern Florida did. to promote acclimatization of citrus trees, avocados, and other tropical species or fruit trees or medicinal plants. The pressure to develop “tropical” agriculture grew with the Taking Over The American Breakfast Table Soviet economic policy of self-sufficiency, and the scheme was overall a success. The As it happens, a desire to enjoy the country’s very own tropics has been mated with 11 region largely met domestic demand for tea and tobacco, but transport constraints long 12 technologically enhanced opportunity, especially in terms of accessibility. Although impeded the production of citrus fruits. Although the coastal railway to Georgia most of the Gulf Coast had been approachable by ship or rail by the mid 19th was finally completed in the 1920s, the transport of perishable fruits was impossible Century, nearly all of peninsular Florida lay beyond the reach of any but the most without then-scarce refrigerated boxcars. As a result, never easily obtainable tangerines fanatic of travelers until the 1890s. Shrewdly anticipating the eventual economic and and oranges (the only fresh fruits available to Russia in winter) acquired the prestige of demographic payoff of the region, Henry M. Plant plunged into the wilderness and rare delicacies. began to develop a rail system into southwest Florida, while Henry M. Flagler extended his Florida East Coast Railway into Palm Beach by 1893 and Miami by 1896. Modern Citrus fruit revolutionized the agricultural scene in the 1960s. While the Frost Belt Florida had been born. People could come in; oranges could go out, both in great was discovering Tropical South through exploding tourism, the natives of the Tropical volume and at reasonable cost. South were discovering the bonanza of northern markets, which the inefficient state sector could never satiate with products of the “Lush South.” The belated spread of As the years passed, Florida’s rail network grew, and the transformation of the affordable air transport and private autos put the European regions of the USSR within environment set in with it. With the availability of power machinery for earth-moving, easy reach of the Tropical South for the first time. Meanwhile, the increasingly laissez- much of the shoreline of the region has undergone radical change as urban developers faire Soviet regime was relaxing its vigilant control over local affairs. All of these factors have filled in or reshaped wetlands to create new waterfront lots. Inland, there has been explain the rapid expansion of private (rather than collectivized) agriculture and the the inevitable suburbanization and sprawl of such metropolises as Orlando, Winter eventual triumph of the shadow economy in the region. Haven, and Lakeland, despite problems in drainage. Wetlands were also transformed into prime orchards and vegetable gardens, and specialized agriculture and horticulture The private plots of collective farmers were rapidly converted into intensively cultivated created a family resemblance between the economies of the Gulf and Florida sections citrus orchards, flower, and early vegetable gardens, while production in the collective of the Tropical South. Their climates enable them to grow a variety of tropical and sector was neglected. In the balance, “tropical” produce was kept below demand with subtropical fruits, vegetables, and ornamental plants not otherwise available cheaply in monopolistically high prices. Private farming became an extremely lucrative activity, the eastern United States and to penetrate northern markets with fresh produce all year. open only to the native rural population. Ironically, it could be such a source of wealth only within the Soviet socialist economy, where a closed domestic market ruled out Thus Florida and Gulf coast growers find it profitable to rush the first lettuce, green foreign competition, laws prevented outsiders from buying land in the Tropical South, peppers, corn, and tomatoes of the season northward every spring while the Midwest and the absence of free market prices and realistic taxation boosted the profits made on and Northeast are still frost bound; and, similarly, mid latitude consumers will pay exotic crops. A shipment of tangerines or flowers delivered to Moscow or Donetsk in premium prices for the earliest cantaloupes and watermelons of the year. Here is also the midst of winter could command almost any price, and little wonder that an average the only part of the United States outside Hawaii where sugar cane can be grown and annual crop of tangerines from a family lot in Adzharia produced a household income harvested, though at considerable risk of frost every few years. The development of 50 to 100 times higher than a private plot of equal area in European Russia. frozen juice concentrate in the 1940s allowed the Tropical South to surpass California in output of oranges, tangerines, and grapefruit; and few people in America can 13 14 Such easy wealth in agriculture set off a chain reaction throughout the economy as a sit down to their breakfast juice today without feeling the influence of the region. whole. The great inflow of money into Georgia pushed up demand and black market Despite these successes, two principal problems for the area’s agriculture remain: prices for consumer goods that could not be produced by weak local industry, thus the recruitment of a transient labor force from domestic and foreign sources and luring many people into profitable speculative trade. Merchandise purchased at fixed increasingly effective competition from Mexico and the West Indies. But in the case of low prices in state shops in cities “up north” was taken south to be resold at several at least one major (though climatically marginal) crop in Louisiana and Florida sugar times the original price. Thus, overpriced agricultural produce from the “shadow” cane governmental support has come to the rescue in the form of subsidies and quotas private sector went North, just as state-subsidized consumer goods from the north on foreign imports. traveled south, creating immense profits in both directions; and in a uniquely Soviet reversal of scenarios common elsewhere, the agricultural South in fact benefitted at the THEME 1: THE SUN-AND-SIN ECONOMY expense of the developed North. Populating A Sunbelt THEME 1: THE SUN-AND-SIN ECONOMY Probably more than any other state, Florida has benefitted from the building of the Manufacturing A Sunbelt Interstate Highway System from the mid 1950s onward. It has brought this subtropical wonderland within one or two day driving time for a considerable majority of Over half of all Soviets who left their immediate home areas for vacation went to Americans. By the thousands and hundreds of thousands they came: the permanently the Black Sea coasts. Moreover, most of them crowded into the central stretch, from transplanted, the tourists, conventioneers, snowbirds, retirees, refugees, migrant the southern tip of the Crimea roughly to Sukhumi, which over the years became workers, and college students on their spring break, all in search of their version of something of a linear recreational metropolis. The names of Yalta, Sochi, or Gagra were the latterday American Dream. During every single decade since 1900 (with the known to every Soviet as resorts symbolizing middle class prestige. exception of the 1910s and 1930s, with World War I and the Great Depression), the total population of the state has grown by at least 30 percent and in the 1950s at the The developed resort strip is very narrow and even frequently interrupted by mountain astonishing rate of 78.7 percent. The peninsular segment of Florida claimed the lion’s spurs falling abruptly into the sea. The mountains prevent physical expansion into share of the increment, with a demographic explosion taking place largely in the major the hinterland, putting demand pressure on existing facilities and creating an overall cities. Smaller urban centers also welcomed their share of the new arrivals, as did much impression of severe crowding. Yet such overpopulated built-up areas are interspersed of the nominally rural countryside. To a degree probably unmatched elsewhere in with undeveloped stretches of the coast or populous villages. The curious combination North America, this region holds many scattered residential developments seemingly in of densely packed resorts and generally extensive land use could only be possible in the middle of nowhere. Much of the western component of the Tropical South has not the absence of a true market for land. Health resorts were operated like any socialist been able to match southern Florida’s feverish growth pattern, a fact that raises some enterprise, in a strictly planned and “organized” way. There were no readily available provocative questions. The Mobile and Baton Rouge metropolitan areas have registered 15 16 drop-in motels or hotels on the coast. Reservations for state-operated resorts were at only slight gains, the population of Greater New Orleans seems to be at a standstill, a premium and normally obtained through one’s trade union, frequently involving and several counties located between southeast Texas and the Florida Alabama line several years’ wait for a turn to go to a more desirable location. As a result, skyrocketing along the Gulf Coast suffered population decline over the same period. What is the numbers of so-called “wild” visitors rented a room or even just a bunk in a private explanation for these two quite different trajectories of growth? residence. The incredible congestion of cheaper accommodations and prohibitive prices Part of the answer lies in the contrasting situations of the two areas at the start of for better ones explained the high seasonal incomes of those who were lucky enough the boom period. Peninsular Florida was almost a clean slate, especially after the to be permanent local residents. Always tolerated, this was a rare sphere of officially elimination of much of the indigenous population. In contrast, the Gulf Coast was allowed private enterprise in the USSR. Not surprisingly, since 1897 the pull of the sun already rather well developed; in particular, the banks of the lower Mississippi were and lucrative occupations produced a more than seven-fold increase in the population taken up by all manner of economic enterprises, and a well entrenched population had of the “resort” segment of the coast, making it the fastest-growing region of the former preempted all the relatively dry or accessible portions of the bayou country within the Soviet Union. Delta. Expansion of the venerable, regionally dominant metropolis of New Orleans, In contrast to the resort economy of the Crimean and Russian parts of the Tropical which had consistently ranked among the top half dozen cities of antebellum America, South, it was more lucrative to spend solar energy in Georgia on plants than on human was becoming problematic. In part this has been a matter of the sheer physical sunbathers. Western Georgia is an endless village that sprawls along all major roads constraints of a difficult site, but at a more fundamental level the city is afflicted by the and blankets hillsides. While the line between urban and rural was so sharp in most of same syndrome of social ills bedeviling the older metropolises of the so called Rust Belt. the former USSR, it was blurred in Georgia, which remains an essentially rural society The Texas and Louisiana portions of the region are abundantly endowed with with urban population barely exceeding half of the total. The towns are for the most petroleum and natural gas both on land and under water and also blessed with some part local commercial and food industry centers, and even in cities much of the income of the world’s richest reserves of salt and sulfur. The mineral wealth of the Gulf Coast comes from the countryside: either through family channels or by exploiting positions makes it much more heavily industrialized in the conventional sense than is Florida, of power. but Florida is well ahead in attracting the newer high tech and information based The lackluster performance of the official economy of Georgia stands in stark contrast industries thanks to the siren call of amenities the living conditions that enable the area to its visible prosperity. If one excludes the three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, to bid successfully for skilled technicians, professionals, managers, and executives. As a and Estonia (which ranked first in the USSR in both well-being and economic region so largely devoted to the production and sale of pleasure, the Tropical South is performance), then Georgia emerged first in the rate of private car ownership, but only peculiarly sensitive to the crests and troughs in the national and international economy. seventh in terms of national product per capita. This discrepancy is eloquent proof Overbuilding and excessive expansion followed by temporary collapse has become a of the pre-eminence of “shadow” sources of wealth in a generally underdeveloped familiar cycle. But even more troublesome is the fact that here there is a zone poised economy. According to 1980s data, Georgia, endowed as it was with the best between the wealth and glitter of the United States and the poverty of more than a 17 18 agricultural lands in the former USSR, ranked only seventh in the value of agricultural dozen countries just over the horizon. The moral and material tensions between the two product per unit of sown area. Such dismal performance of the state sector stemmed worlds are stark and insistent. from its degradation into little more than a smokescreen for lucrative underground or “second economy” activities. Carefully cultivated private lots stand in striking contrast Smugglers’ Coves to the deplorable state of collective farm fields. One of the basic facts of international life is that there is inevitably a lively illegal trade If the Soviet Sunbelt is measured in terms of in-migration or economic power, it would in all sorts of things wherever two countries at very different levels of development appear to be a failure. Its population has barely reached 5 million (6 million with are within striking distance of each other. Nowhere in the developed world is there Odessa) and market reforms now mean that the polluted beaches and expensive fruits stronger proof of this axiom than in the American Tropical South. It may be impossible of the region will face competition from Bulgaria and the Mediterranean. The palatial to determine precisely the volume of contraband being smuggled, but the indirect houses of the village nouveaux-riches are a facade, with their tasteless decorations trying evidence is convincing enough. It is likely that the flow of illegal aliens and goods into to imitate marble but still unmistakably stucco. The whole prosperity of the region was Louisiana, Florida, and other parts of the region had materialized as early as the 1800’s. based on using the anomalies of the Soviet system. Without this system, each grand The authorities have always been hard put to patrol so long a coastline with its myriad villa of the Tropical South may prove to be only a house of cards. coves and beaches, and it was especially difficult back when so much of the region was thinly settled. But the action became really hot and heavy during the Prohibition Era Playing the Black Market (1920 1933), when parched Americans were eager customers for the bottled goods carried by rum runners in speedboats and other vessels from the Bahamas, Cuba, and Many people are taken in by the gaudy displays and believe that Georgia’s prosperity is other points. due to an entrepreneurial streak in its population, but reality suggests otherwise. Rather than modernizing the region and helping to develop the western-style work ethic, the If this illegal trade has become much more diversified of late, one category of freight massive infusion of unearned wealth into rural areas helped to preserve or revive many strongly dominates the scene: narcotics. This commerce, only a small fraction of which traditionalist cultural codes of society, including the leisurely attitudes of a once- is intercepted and confiscated by government agents, certainly runs into the billions of numerous petty gentry. The stress on ritual display of goods, on the expenditure of dollars each year. It relies on all sorts of transport from baggage and clothing of travelers huge sums on elaborate feasts with show-off hospitality and on expensively decorated to camouflaged cargo on scheduled airliners and freighters, light planes landing at cemetery plots only reinforces the desperate quest for wealth. isolated airstrips, and small ocean craft seeking out obscure inlets. The proceeds from this and other outlaw enterprises generate much of the prosperity of a booming The question of whether to consider the shadow economy of the Tropical South regional banking industry by means of various money laundering schemes. (especially Georgia) as criminal is highly ambiguous. It certainly seemed illegal from the viewpoint of Frost Belt populations who felt exploited; for the local population it 19 20 was simply the clever use of loopholes in the socialist system. Obviously, the second In addition to drugs, the Tropical South is the entry zone for such other commodities economy existed throughout the Soviet Union, but in Georgia it might well have as prohibited animal pelts and feathers, live birds and other endangered creatures, been larger than the official or “first” economy. Corruption, black marketeering, archeological articles, and art objects. But far surpassing all these in importance is illicit speculation, and bribe-taking were carried out on an unprecedented scale and with traffic in human beings. As already dismal living conditions continue to deteriorate for unrivalled daring. The reasons for this were largely in Georgia’s uniquely privileged much of the rapidly growing populations of the Caribbean and Latin America, many position in the former USSR. desperate persons have opted for northern flight. Florida has been the principal target for the newcomers, the great majority of whom in recent times have arrived from Cuba Open favoritism by Moscow started with Stalin and gave the ruling ethnic elite a and Haiti (the former group for the most part legally), but Bahamians, Dominicans, free hand within the republic. The combination of local political autonomy with the and many other folks have managed to filter into most regions of the Tropical South. Caucasian reliance on familial and clan ties in all aspects of life led to the creation of a nearly impenetrable network of mutual aid and protection that clearly excluded those THEME 2: AMERICAN SHORE OF THE TURBULENT CARIBBEAN who were not part of the system. Illegal economic operations and exchanges produced great personal wealth for many Georgians, while the official economy of the republic The Tropical South contains a striking internal ethnic diversity that makes it distinct grew only insignificantly. In the sunlit Tropical South, many people prospered by from the rest of the United States. Intra regional patterns show that the mix of people staying in the shadows. living along the Gulf Coast is decidedly unlike that in peninsular Florida. In fact, the ethnic personality of southern Louisiana is about as different from mainstream America THEME 2: STORMS ALONG THE BLACK SEA as any sizeable chunk of the country can be. Most of the Black population originated as transferred slaves from the French West Indies. Some residents of New Orleans arrived The newly acquired wealth of the region has increased the stakes for control of this directly from France, the rest by way of the West Indies or as dispossessed Acadians valuable prize. Since the coast had almost no tradition of statehood and its rise from (Cajuns) from Nova Scotia. Until recently, the back country of southern Louisiana poverty was so recent, the political arenas of the states that carve up the coast were remained one of America’s most isolated regions, and the dwellers in its bayous and traditionally dominated by inland areas, and the rapid ascendancy of the coasts has prairies preserved and enjoyed their own quite special brand of culture. The “discovery” introduced a peculiar dichotomy between the centers of “money power” and traditional of the Cajun/Creole enclave has resulted in efforts to maintain the local French patois power seats. The newly independent states of Georgia and Ukraine have tried to and to celebrate other elements of the cultural heritage, especially the local cuisine strengthen their grip on the rich coasts, reviving the deep, ancient cultural divide (indeed, many regard New Orleans as the gastronomic capital of North America) and between coast and hinterland. dance music (zydeco). Ethnic separateness from the “mainland” is about the only unifying thread in the bewildering ethnic mosaic of the Tropical South. The region’s geographic isolation and 21 22 historic obscurity allowed it to preserve populations ethnically separate from those in In the sharpest of contrasts to the Gulf Coast, the peopling of southern Florida adjoining parts of Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova. Thus coastal Georgia is populated has been a recent affair, with only a small minority of the people in question not with Adzharians, Mengrelians, and Abkhazians. Adzharians speak Georgian, but themselves migrants. The newcomers to Florida’s east coast have originated mostly centuries of Ottoman rule (until 1878) resulted in a strong sense of Muslim identity. in the Northeastern states, so much so that the area has begun to mimic New York, Abkhazians are largely Muslim and have a language and political history quite separate New Jersey, and Pennsylvania in many of its social and cultural characteristics, while from Georgia. Between Abkhazia and Adzharia live Mengrelians, who speak their own along the west coast, the new Floridians have largely originated from the Midwestern language and have an identity separate from Georgian, while the traditional Georgian states. The popular image of Florida as a haven for the elderly is not illusory. Retirees perception of them has been a pejorative one of rural hicks, the target of ethnic are definitely over represented statistically in the population, most notably in Tampa jokes. Coastal Bessarabia is part of Ukraine claimed by Moldova, yet the majority St. Petersburg, the metropolitan area that leads all others in the nation in terms of of its population are neither Ukrainian nor Moldovan, but Bulgarian, Russian, and percentage of persons aged 65 and older. But the biggest story in terms of population Gagauz (Turkic-speaking Orthodox Christians). Finally, in the Ukrainian Crimea, the may be the influx of Spanish-speaking peoples. In 1950, only 4 percent of Dade population is over 80 percent Russian. County’s population was Hispanic; in 1990 the value was 47.5 percent and still rising, with two thirds Cuban in origin. The Miami area now contains the greatest The region’s history is filled with dramas of voluntary and forced exiles of whole concentration of Cubans anywhere outside the homeland. Yet all has not been smooth peoples. Before the Russo-Turkish wars, the coast of present-day Krasnodar territory in the flow of peoples into the the Tropical South. The influx of Hispanics into the was populated by Circassians, people related to Abkhazians. Circassians long valiantly Tropical South has accelerated the suburban flight of Anglos and other white European resisted the Russian advent, and the impressed victors, eager to vacate the coast from groups from Miami and other cities. And within those cities tensions have run Ottoman subjects, offered them the option of emigrating to Turkey. The majority left, particularly high between Hispanics and the African American residents who resent and today Circassians and Abkhazians number about one million in Turkey, more the competition for jobs and housing. Language is another issue yet to be resolved. than in Russia and Georgia combined. At the same time, many Crimean Tatars left the Although the newcomers are learning English quickly, Spanish remains the preferred Crimea, giving Russians a decisive majority which was later finalized by the deportation language for most. In effect, much of southern Florida is becoming bilingual. of Crimean Tatars in 1944. Today, there are some five million Crimean Tatars in Turkey, while only one million in all of the former USSR. In geopolitical terms, the Caribbean has been virtually an American lake since the 1820s, when the Monroe Doctrine claimed the Americas as the exclusive arena of the This gruesome burden of unsettled ethnic accounts was exacerbated by administrative United States. Military incursions into Panama, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, changes during the Soviet period, with the creation of ethnically-based states in which and, by proxy, Nicaragua, are only the most recent of a series of such U.S. interventions the peoples of the coastal areas were small minorities. Discrimination and nationalism that have involved every country in the Caribbean region. The American flag still flies have slowly diluted the ethnic diversity of the coastal strip. Thus, Abkhazia was over Puerto Rico, the American Virgin Islands, and Guantanamo, Cuba; and for all originally a separate union republic, but in 1932 it was made an autonomous part of 23 24 Georgia (the state which the leading Soviet freedom-fighter, the late academician Andre practical purposes, Cuba was an American possession until the Castro regime took Sakharov, called a mini-empire for aggressive ethnocentrism and discrimination). over in 1959. At the time of the annexation of Spanish Florida, the justification was But the Abkhaz and Adzhar units existed mostly in name, and even the very title that it was a “blunt dagger” pointed at the United States; but the dagger really points “Adzharian” has been struck from the population census lists. An official campaign was southward. undertaken to replace Muslim names with typically Georgian ones, and not a single In terms of economy, the Caribbean has long been an American lake as well. The mosque remains in Batumi. In the 1970s Abkhazians began to agitate openly for greater Gulf ports and New Orleans in particular have served as the principal gateways for influence in the affairs of their own region and to favor secession into Russia, until in the receipt of tropical produce and other exports from Central America, Mexico, the 1992, the Georgian versus Abkhazian struggle erupted again into all-out war. Antilles, Venezuela, and Colombia, while money has flowed freely back and forth. In a similarly complex circumstance, the Crimea was part of Russia until 1954, when The economies of Jamaica, the Bahamas, Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and many of the it was transferred to Ukraine as a “gift.” Not surprisingly, Ukrainian independence Lesser Antilles might well collapse without North American tourism. In some ways, prompts strong Crimean sentiment for secession into Russia. Throughout the Tropical Miami has become the capital of the Caribbean. South, loyalty to Georgian, Ukranian, or Moldovan states comes only third after There is a certain delicious irony in the fact that so many hundreds of thousands of local ethnic identities and pro-Russian sentiment (largely the product of the desire to Spanish speaking immigrants have been flocking to a former corner of an empire the preserve the fragile prosperity that depend on the North). These coastal beachheads are Spanish Crown so systematically ignored back in the time of Columbus. The Tropical precarious though. For example, like Crimea’s previous attempt to become independent South is fast becoming the hot spot of America in many ways: in the growth and in 1917, a new effort can be easily foiled by a Ukrainian blockade of the peninsula ethnic mixture of its population, in the economic explosion associated with pleasure (which receives three-quarters of its food and fresh water from mainland Ukraine). enterprises from Miami resorts to baseball spring training camps to Disney World, and The devolution of the USSR demonstrated how shaky is the very existence of the in the geopolitical tempest of its connections to the Caribbean Sea. Tropical South. The region failed to become a true Sunbelt, while Russia became one more empire that failed to keep the Black Sea ring. Ancient Russians called the sea “Black” for its frequent and violent storms, and the conflict-torn region still seems to be perched on the edge of deep and turbulent waters.

25 26

MEXISTAN MEXISTAN Raymond Krishchyunas Wilbur Zelinsky

The fragrance of the spring steppe near Dzhezkazgan is inebriating. In Could this place be in the United States? The plaza in Santa Fe, New the area where the grasslands are not yet plowed under or overgrazed to Mexico does not seem to be standard American. The architecture suits the become a desert, where the land blooms blood red with poppies and the southwest desert and the merchandise offered by the sidewalk vendors is wild tulips grow, the memories brought back by that smell may drive a unfamiliar, but appealing in its own way - pottery and weavings, Spanish- native Kazakh or Russian alike to sense the hidden strength and vanished American food, leatherwork, mementos of the Old Anglo West. Even the glory of this land. In the restlessly nomadic Russian spirit it awakens the skies are bluer, the air more transparent, and the smells different. People subdued urge to move into open spaces; in the hearts of yesterday’s may expect something exotic in border towns like Mexicali, but this place nomads, the Kazakh people, it may stir the image of the pastoralists’ is more than 200 miles from Mexico, and no foreign flags are flapping in the happiness, expressed in the poem of Kazakh 19th century poet Abai breeze. Kunanbaev: But at a second look the city begins to feel less alien, even to East Coast On springtime pasture my people gather; Americans. The “southwestern” furniture and jewelry displayed in the shop Kinsmen embrace and rejoice together. windows look similar to ones sold in fashionable establishments back Joking and laughing, they stand and chat, east, and the more adventurous suburbs throughout the United States are About everything -from their herds to the weather. copying these Pueblo or Spanish motif buildings. But the pleasant reverie set off by the spring grasses may end abruptly Santa Fe turns out to be not an exotic place at all, but rather something with the roar and blast-off of a rocket from nearby Baikonur, for this ancient both uniquely influential and peculiarly emblematic of a special region and steppe was turned into the launching site for all Soviet manned missions a new way of thinking about places in the United States. This is the land of into space. The faces of this region could not be in greater contrast, yet is it intertwined peoples, a place clearly rooted in times long past, but a place any wonder in this place where two worlds meet? that speaks to Americans of an altogether possible postmodern future, where cultures and lifestyles hybridize into new, unpredictable forms. 1 2 3 4 - A GRASSLAND COMMONS WHICH DOESN’T QUITE UNIFY AN INTERNATIONAL BORDER WHICH DOESN’T QUITE DIVIDE Almost all of the region is a wide belt of dry grasslands and semi-deserts. To the The international boundary between Mexico and the United States bisects two halves north lie the steppes and forest; to the south, the mountains of Central Asia with which are certainly distinct, yet are intimately intertwined. It is this line that gives their intricate lace of piedmont oases. From ancient times this sea of grass was home vitality and substance to the entire region, acting as the spine or central organizing to a succession of nomadic peoples who navigated it on camel and horseback. For mechanism. “Mexistan” is the place where two streams of people and their cultures have the nomads the grasslands, extending from China to the very doorstep of Europe, entered, met head-on, and intersected, one arriving from the south, the other from the were a highway of expansion and a base of operations for plundering richer sedentary east and north, and both superimposing themselves upon various earlier, stubbornly neighbors to the north and south. The Kalmyk people in the extreme west who speak surviving Native American societies. a Mongol-related language and profess Buddhism are an exotic reminder of the past The border is a crucible for intense interaction and some remarkable international unity of the huge nomadic sea. chemistry, an interface that has sprayed its effects far into the interiors of the U.S. and The heirs to the latest wave of nomads, the Kazakhs and Kirgiz, are a product of the Mexico alike. It is difficult to think of any other border that jostles together two such blending of various local Turkic peoples with Mongol invaders. Their languages are utterly different ways of life. More than 1500 miles in length, it has much in common Turkic, while in racial type they are distinctly Mongoloid. Among the Kazakhs, Kirgiz with many other international boundaries established by the imperial European powers and Turkmens, the nomadic way of life prevailed until the 20th century, and nomadic and their settler colonies during the 19th Century. Generally, there was little thought traits are still a visible element of their culture. The origins of the ethnic name “Kazakh” given to historical or cultural realities, but maximum attention to national power, are probably the same as of “Kazak” (the Russian for Cossack) and are often traced to profit, and convenience. The outcome is the legacy of a one-sided conflict and US the Turkic “qaz” (to wander). invasion in the 1840s and the subsequent diplomatic armtwisting, and has never made a great deal of sense in terms of either physical or human geography. Being a nomad is practically defined through cattle ownership. Abai Kunanbaev wrote, “Honor, reason, science, all for them is less than the herds. They think that by the The Rio Grande is a flimsy, porous barrier since its waters are only waist-deep or even gift of livestock they receive the good opinion even of God. For them religion, the lower much of the time. Elsewhere the boundary is a sequence of straight segments people and influence is all livestock.” Even the souls of dead ancestors were believed to that blithely ignore the lay of the land and seldom impede the determined wanderer. occupy animal bodies. The Kirgiz, with their annual migrations from alpine pastures to In fact, the whole U.S.-Mexican boundary has always been a rather permeable sort of lower valleys, were nomadic as well and are closely related to Kazakhs, although their membrane, so much so that the social and cultural presence of the foreign neighbor is mountain environment is quite different from dry grasslands. readily detectable some hundreds of miles beyond the border checkpoints.

5 6 Both the Kazakhs and Kirgizs became distinctly separate people around the year The least “Mexican” segment of Mexico may be the northern Mexican states along the 1500, about the same time as the emergence of their future adversaries, Russians border - places in which the imprint of North American culture is inescapable - and and Uzbeks. Ever since, the region has been either a buffer or a bridge between two likewise, in terms of U.S. territory, New Mexico, roughly half of Arizona and Texas, mutually opposed worlds: European-Christian Russia to the north and Islamic Central and small slivers of Colorado and California are the least standard region within the Asia (where the Uzbeks dominated) to the south. Maneuvering between these two U.S based on the traditional Anglo definition of what is American. But perhaps these expansionist forces, the Kazakhs managed to preserve the independence of their tribal terms are already out-of-date, and here in Mexistan, a new idea of “American” is being federations until the mid-19th century, when Central Asia was annexed by the Russian born. Empire in the worldwide scramble for colonies. The native population found itself within the same state with Russia and Islamic Asia and was heavily influenced by both. Where Mexico Meets Anglo-America But even if the two once opposed worlds overlapped here, they have as yet hardly The initial European thrust into the region came in the 1540s, not long after the blended. The grassland commons are vast enough to be shared by both Europe and conquest of Mexico. Motivated by rumors of opulent cities to the north, Spanish Asia, presenting the two faces of the dual society of the region. explorers marched through New Mexico and as far as Kansas before turning back with Where Russia and Islam Converge empty hands. So great was their disillusionment that it was not until 1598 that the Spanish regime founded the first church missions and settler colonies in the upper Rio Even a hundred years ago the nomadic corridor was much wider. But for the sedentary Grande valley. The settlers were few because the economic potential of the area was so neighbors of the nomads, the grasslands were an open frontier. By the late 18th century, meager and the supply lines and communications to the well-settled core area of New Southern Ukraine and lands on the Volga were lost to the nomad and gained by the Spain were so slow and hazardous. Nevertheless this remote outpost has somehow Slav farmer. What remained was no longer the commons for the nomads’ wandering, persisted, and the descendants of the pioneer generations still cling proudly to their but rather their besieged refuge. Already by the 17th century, Russian and Kazakh Spanish (rather than simply Mexican) heritage. The introduction of European cultural expansion clashed in the zone between the Siberian forests and the grasslands - the zone items, most notably livestock, metal-working, and an assortment of grains, fruits, that was summer pastures to the Kazakhs, but virgin lands waiting for the plow from vegetables, and other domesticated plants, meant considerable change in the economy the European viewpoint. and lifestyles of the surviving Native American groups. The cliche of official Soviet history about the peaceful incorporation of Kazakhstan into the Empire was not entirely hypocritical. Acting as an arbiter in the perpetual squabblings of the khans (local leaders, considered the direct political successors of the Mongol Genghiz Khan) for about a 150 years Russia did not move beyond its fortified boundary which stretched almost exactly along the present-day northern boundary of 7 8 Kazakhstan. One after another the khans of major groups accepted the Russian While this Rio Grande corridor was the least unsuccessful Hispanic venture into protectorate, but Russian presence became a reality only after the 1840s when the line Mexistan, there were two other paths of colonization inot the region. Missionaries and of forts encircled Kazakh territory. The subjugation of the grasslands was made easier settlers managed to create a foothold in the Santa Cruz Valley in southern Arizona. To by the nomads’ lack of unity. Until they were brought together by the Russian rule, the the east, the Spanish had explored parts of Texas, but it was not until 1690 that the three major groups of Kazakhs were quite separate and each was caught in a personal first church missions were attempted, and gradually handfuls of colonists and soldiers vice between Russia and Asia. The term for their social and political organization was set up small outposts in central Texas. But the Texas strategy was a halfhearted one, “horde,” and the Kazakhs were divided into three of these federations, believed to and the newcomers had barely begun to set down serious roots in the region before date back to the sixteenth century, and translated as “Great, Middle, and Small.” The bands of Anglo-Americans started to arrive in the 1820s to dispute ownership of the Small (or Junior) Horde was under pressure from the special Russian government in land. At that time, this was as remote and obscure a section of the Greater European Orenburg and from the oasis Khanate (or kingdom under the khan leadership) of World as could be imagined--almost totally out of sight and out of mind, an area of the Khiva. The Middle Horde was controlled by the Russian governor in Petropavlovsk on most marginal economic value and of concern only because of potential geopolitical the one side and lost territory to the Khanate of Kokand on the other. The Great, or conflicts. “Senior,” Horde was gripped between a third Russian headquarters in Semipalatinsk The coming of the Americans heralded the beginning of the modern Mexistan. The and Chinese pressure. The Turkmens were caught between traditional dependency movement of an expanding United States started with the incursion into the Mexistan to Persia and the Russian conquest, which arrived across the sea and spread from the periphery, the fertile, well-watered woodlands and prairies of central Texas by land- coastal base in Krasnovodsk. These separate corridors of conquest were later revived in hungry folks from the American South who were quickly to evolve into Texans. At the configuration of railways that crossed the region en route to Central Asia. Historic the same time, the central segment of “MexAmerica” became a player on the North disunity persists in the economic disunity of the region today. American stage by virtue of its location. Merchants from the United States rushed to By the 1870s when the conquest of Central Asia was complete, the nomads discovered exploit the lucrative trade of transporting goods in pack trains via the so-called Santa Fe themselves living in the midst of Russian possessions. The long process of the shrinking Trail, one of the principal land routes to California. The Gold Rush and the subsequent of the nomadic sea culminated with the opening of the Kazakh grasslands to Russian population and economic developments in California shortly after the U.S. annexation homesteaders in 1889. By 1917, the northern zone of more fertile steppe (the Virgin of “MexAmerica” made it imperative to have reliable overland connections with the Lands) was settled by a flood of Slavs, and the range became Russia’s latest granary. East. Wagon trails and steam railroad systems were promptly created. Burgeoning The boundaries of what remained to become our region can be easily drawn as ethnic commerce breathed considerable life into both older and newer towns situated at and cultural ones. To the north, Russian-speaking population strongly dominates and strategic nodes along the routes: El Paso, Albuquerque, Tucson, and Yuma. large-scale grain farming prevails over livestock breeding. In the south, the boundary is drawn where the ancient tradition of oasis-based irrigated farming and the heritage of 9 Islam become prevalent over nomadic patterns. 10 Islamic Asia was winning the nomads’ hearts at the same time that Russia was The end of the Mexican War in 1848 removed all doubt as to who would be the gaining their lands. Although in their numerous treaties with the Steppe rulers Russia controlling population in Texas, with Anglos subduing the Hispanic population. Yet consistently referred to the natives as Moslems, that was an overstatement. Kazakhs and in a sense Mexico responded with a steadily growing migration of its residents into Kirgiz embraced Islam only superficially, retaining nearly unchanged the old totemistic the United States. Today, the outer boundary of American Mexistan is that of the area cults dating back to the times of Tamerlane (sometimes called “Timur”, Tamerlane where important Hispanic presence is clearly evident. This boundary may partially centered his empire of the late 14th century in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, and conquered reflect the environmental tastes of Mexican migrants gravitating to places that look and an area from Iran through India). In fact, the devout Moslems of the oases of Central feel familiar. With its several rugged, north-south-trending mountain ranges, various Asia proper treated them as infidels. Following Russian conquest, Islam became the plateaus and basins, a multitude of dry stream beds and short supply of rivers, and an natural rallying point in seeking a resistant cultural image, reinforced by the fact that abundance of deserts, nearly all of Mexistan would look like home to any citizen from the nomads were united within the same Empire that incorporated the Islamic centers the upland sections of Mexico. of Bukhara and Samarkand. Ironically, Russian conquest thus actually promoted the By 1900 the total number of persons inhabiting the core of Mexistan (i.e. without recent Islamization of the steppe. Texas) was only approximately 200,000. But by the 1990 count, Mexistan was Exactly one hundred years after Russian colonization began, the 1989 population home to some 12 million persons. The older string of cities along the Santa Fe trail estimate of this vast region found a sparse 12 million inhabitants, 48 percent of whom was supplemented by a new string of twin cities that have grown like crystals along were indigenous Muslim peoples, while the Slavic population (mostly Russians and the string that is the international border: from San Diego/Tijuana to Brownsville/ russified Ukrainians) accounted for 35 percent. Yet this ethnic duality developed only Matamoros. The presence of these paired cities indicates confluence of two social recently. Even immediately before the Second World War, the region’s population was streams that cannot quite be kept apart, even by such a significant line on the map. only 4 million and was heavily dominated by natives. The attraction of mineral wealth brought about swift and sweeping change. Strategically located far from troublesome western boundaries, the mineral resources of the former nomadic range became especially important during the Second World War and Cold War years. As the native population remained in the countryside, Russians mostly carried out development. New industrial cities have become ethnic islands, and the gap between the modernity of urban areas and the traditionalism of countryside coincides with the divide between the European and native populations.

11 12 Soviet Union’s Testing Ground The Market’s Testing Ground With the advent of Soviet control, the region became a huge testing ground in the These dramatic changes reflect major post-war developments in Mexamerica,which experiment of planting socialism on Asiatic soil. Stalin’s collectivization drive revived became a sort of testing ground for the latest permutations of a hi-tech driven economy the tsarist attempt to settle the nomads and completely uprooted the traditional way and sun-driven urbanization. of life. While the Kazakhs had no conception of private land ownership, livestock Entrepreneurs have set up a multitude of “Maquiladoras” or “maquilas” south of the was always owned privately and was the single most important measure of one’s social international border that cuts through Mexistan. These inventions are factories owned status. Loath to give their animals to the collective, Kazakhs preferred to slaughter by non-Mexicans and usually run by foreign-supplied machinery, but with a largely their herds. In the famine that followed, the population decreased by a quarter - a Mexican female work force. Products manufactured or assembled here are exported loss of life unprecedented even in Stalinist USSR, and the blow that sealed Kazakh to the United States and elsewhere. The Maquiladora phenomenon has changed the submission to whatever system the Russians imported. It is sadly ironic that the shocks character of the border and with it, of Mexistan. Almost half a million people are to the native way of life here were particularly heavy exactly because the region was employed in these factories which have become the second highest source of revenue never perceived or treated by Russians as a mere colony, but rather as a land of people for the Mexican economy, surpassed only by the oil industry. Boomtowns are growing who could be taught to accept mainstream Russian/Soviet civilization for their own along the border, attracting migrants by the tens and hundreds of thousands, person in benefit. As early as the 18th century, Catherine the Great sent wheat seeds and advisers search of jobs and a better life. And the opportunities are there, at least for those with to teach the Kazakhs to grow grain, and Kazakh youths began to receive Russian modest expectations. education. The far-sightedness of such policies became apparent later: in an about-face, many Kazakh nationalist intellectuals who proclaimed independence during Russia’s The arterial heart of Mexistan, the international border, has attracted more than two Civil War became early Kazakh Bolsheviks. Even one of the leaders of the 1916 anti- thousand Maquiladoras now, all within a few miles of the boundary. Productivity Russian rebellion became a pro-Bolshevik field commander in the Civil War and in these factories is reputed to be close to that of U.S. workers, despite much lower later the communist leader of Kazakhstan. Altogether, the republics of Kazakhstan wages (which, from the viewpoint of the Mexicans, are still higher than those available and Kyrgyzstan had the unofficial reputation of being the more quiescent parts of the elsewhere in their country). The desirability of the Maquiladoras is debated in both former USSR. the U.S. and Mexico, but one conclusion is clear: two “L” factors have come together in a formula that is changing the character of the region: Labor and the Line. A new The fanciful name for the region, “Mexistan,” provides a unifying idea of cultural twist on the economics of the region is sure to be The North American Free Trade blending, but certainly would not appear on any map of real places; therefore, the Agreement, taking effect in 1994 and promising to eliminate all trade barriers between notion of a “Rossistan” (joining the Persian “stan” or “country” and the Russian Canada, the United States, and Mexico within fifteen years. Thanks to NAFTA, the influence) may be more appropriate here. While the Empire-builders saw this region international boundary may become even less relevant over time. 13 14 as a hinge between Russia-in-Europe and Russia-in-Asia, and as an intermediary for In New Mexico and Arizona, the nature of the region’s lure for the outsider tends to be the further expansion of the Euro-Asian Empire, the non-imperial Russian approach quite different. If the international border has lent the region its focal identity, it is the to Asia was represented by the so-called Eurasionists. The latter believed that Russia- sun that has helped spur the recent enormous growth of Phoenix and other Mexistan Eurasia constituted an independent civilization, equally separate from both Europe metropolises not clinging to the boundary. In terms of climate, natural scenery, and and true Asia, but organically blending elements of both. For them “Rossistan” was the human landscape, here is a region absolutely unlike anything in the eastern United a model for the future grandiose synthesis of Europe and Asia, facilitated by certain States. This is the sunniest part of the country and the warmest as well, an area with common qualities of Russians and natives that made mutual rapport possible. Russian precipitation well below the national average. The simple pleasures of sun and warmth culture contains such elements linking it to the East as the penchant for contemplation, have been enough to satisfy many newcomers and visitors, especially during the winter the devotion to ritual, and the quality of udal (extravagant daring or audacity), a months. The availability of air-conditioning has been a critical factor in making the purely steppe value which Turkic people understood and appreciated. The Russians’ region livable. spiritual proximity to the steppe is matched by the relative adaptability of the nomads. Arizona can claim the championship in a novel North American activity: as the leading The Kazakh open-mindedness and near-paganism (so contrasting with religious roosting place for snowbirds. From December through March by the tens of thousands fundamentalism of Central Asia) seemed to make them more receptive to Russian these seasonal visitors arrive, either pulling their own trailers or motor homes or renting influence. From the Tatars, the original mediators between East and West, the relay some at the scores of trailer parks. They are mostly middle-aged or elderly couples, baton could be passed on to the Kazakhs. coming from the Mid-West and Canada. For a large percentage of these persons, the The new political configuration emerging in place of the former USSR may finally seasonal stayover leads gradually to full-time retirement in Mexistan. The region has fulfill the Eurasionist expectations. Symbolically, Alma Ata (now Almaty) was the site begun to rival Florida and California as a retirement mecca. Added to many other for the signing of the 1991 agreement that created the Commonwealth of Independent enticements is the presence of a large number of residential complexes specifically States (CIS) out of eleven former republics of the USSR. Along with Belarus, designed for the elderly, exclusive colonies with thousands of well-to-do residents all Kazakhstan as an independent state has become the most ardent advocate of closer over the age of 50. integration among the republics of the CIS. This emerging axis of states favoring strong ties, Belarus-Russia-Kazakhstan, includes the traditional geographic go-betweens who have bridged West and East. And just as Belarus of the Crossroads region served as a model case of Soviet socialism in its westernized version, so Kazakhstan was the only case of its relatively successful application in Asia.

15 16 THEME 1: THE DUAL SOCIETY THEME 1: THE DUAL SOCIETY City vs. Countryside The Cities: Mosaic of Barrios In a truly Eurasian synthesizing manner, the region developed a working model of For all the permeability of the international boundary, American and Mexican “Asiatic Socialism.” Soviet institutions in the region were in fact a thin veneer hiding societies stand in rather sharp contrast across the border. In addition to economic a largely traditional society, based on the system of extended family and kinship and political differences, there are sharp distinctions in the way houses, churches, and relationships. Thus high profits earned by the illegal grazing of unaccounted for flocks other buildings are designed and built, rural land parcels bounded, and towns laid on socialist pastures were used to milk the benefits of the urban power system. The out. And, despite a good deal of hybridizing and other forms of give-and-take, one is natives’ comfortable make-believe Socialism contrasted sharply with the exacting struck immediately by the differences in foodways, dress, music, sport, and all manner mainstream Soviet system in which Russians were enmeshed. The system of clan of artistic expression. Also standing in stark contrast are two dissimilar demographic cooperation with accepted forms of official corruption clearly excluded the Russians, regimes that in a real sense clash at the international line. Levels of fertility, age who perceived it all as a kind of collective Kazakh conspiracy. But from the Kazakh structures, forms of mobility, and education and occupational profiles are worlds apart viewpoint, the superfluous adoption of communist rituals was a clever attempt to whenever you compare the numbers for the American and Mexican states that share a outwit the dominating Russians at their own game. In contrast to Central Asia, common boundary. which attempted a defensive withdrawal into Islamic identity, the Kazakhs accepted On the American side of the international boundary, Mexistan is definitely a zone Russian challenges. Characteristically, the Kazakhs display by far the highest level of where a variety of cultures meet. A predominantly Protestant and English-speaking bilingualism of all the Asian republics (63% of Kazakhs are fluent in Russian). society coexists with one in which patterns of speech and the Roman Catholic faith The main line of divide between Russians and Kazakhs is that between the city and have been implanted from Spain via Mexico. In this region, the predominant Anglo countryside. Notwithstanding the recent influx of native population into the cities, culture is Texan, with its famous reputation for enjoying bigness and wealth. But they are still by majority Russian, and natives are seldom encountered in the industrial other cultures enter in as well, from German to Native American, creating a study in sector of the economy. Thus in 1989, Kazakhs accounted for 40 percent of population contrasting cultures. of Kazakhstan (in its political boundaries) but made up only 27 percent of its urban All the metropolises of Mexistan have something essential in common: located in a population and 20 percent of its industrial workforce. At the same time, over 80 region that failed to become a melting pot, they are conglomerates of barrios. In a percent of the rural population were natives. And yet, a vigorous policy of “nativization narrow sense barrios are the ghettos of newly arrived Hispanics. But in cities made up of the cadres” has brought important changes in the comparative employment profiles of cells of mutual social exclusion, the term can be equally applied to the segregation of for the two communities. Key positions were normally held by Kazakhs “sandwiched” newly arrived African-American immigrants or to the self segregated communities of with Russian deputies to maintain the Russian-Kazakh balance of power, but by haughty old Spanish elites and affluent sunbelters and snowbirds. The fragmented 17 18 now the balance has clearly shifted. Russians are still strongly overrepresented in the fabric of city landscapes corresponds to the social hierarchy of Mexistan, where the essentially blue-collar sectors of industry, transport, and construction - occupations top rungs of the occupational ladder are much more likely to be occupied by Anglos. shunned by the Kazakhs, who now dominate the white-collar sectors (with the The modern high-tech industries of Phoenix or Houston are overwhelmingly Anglo exception of science). Although it may be premature to talk about a complete reversal in terms of financing, management, and work force, with only minimal involvement of social roles, in such cities as Almaty, the main social divide is already that between on the part of the Hispanic and African-American communities. One rung down the more proletarian Russians and the new white-collar Kazakh elite. economically from Anglos are the “old Spanish,” who may be poor but are politically active, the proud aristocracy of a land bound together by traditions of patronage. In As educated Kazakhs and Russians compete for the same professional positions in the contrast, recent arrivals from Mexico share with African-Americans the lowest rungs of cities, the friction between the divided populations of the region grows. Increasing the social ladder and thus the least desirable occupations. instances of pressure and discrimination force many Russians to leave. In the 1980s the migrational balance of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan demonstrated a complete reversal of The demographic seesaw of Mexistan answers the influx of each new batch of sun- earlier patterns as Russian exodus began. But most important of all, Russians have long seeking Anglos with the importation of equal or greater number of Hispanics to serve been losing the battle of the cradles. The much higher birth rate among the Muslims is the needs created by new Anglo arrivals. With its growing numbers, the Hispanic fast tipping the population scale back toward native predominance. While in the 1960s community has achieved considerable political power and recognition at levels from Slavs outnumbered native people in both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, by the year 1990 local to national. New Mexico, where the proportion of Spanish-speakers is more than the situation was reversed. 35 percent of the population, has even become the only officially bilingual state of the country. But does a coherent Hispanic identity exist? The duality of the region has a geographic expression as well. In the past, the relative strength of Russian versus Islamic influence was markedly different in the north and Many internal divisions split Hispanics along lines of location, ideology, and even time south of the region. The southern tier rather resembled Central Asia. It was within of arrival. In fact, there is no general consensus even as to what name best applies to easy reach of renowned centers of Islamic thought in Bukhara and Samarkand and the entire community. Such terms as Tejanos, Californios, Chicanos, MexAmericans, embraced the fundamentalist and mystical Islam propagated from there, as well as and La Raza all have some popularity. According to the 1993 Latino National Political irrigated farming techniques. But just as Quranic schools were opening in the south, Survey, few of those surveyed actually call themselves Latinos or Hispanics. Eighty more progressive schools were opened in the north where missionary activity was percent supported bilingual education, but as a means of learning English, not as a way mostly carried out by the Tatars, who by that time had already experienced strong of maintaining separate identity. More than two thirds of American-born Hispanics European impact. speak English better than Spanish. The more ardent ethnic champions use “Aztlan,” the name of a mythical pre-Columbian kingdom, as the name for Mexistan, but no Today, the North-South split persists with the symbolic juxtaposition between official irredentist movement exists, no effort to reattach their homeland to the Mexican and “shadow” capitals of the region’s states. In Kyrgyzstan, the predominantly Russian 19 20 and industrial capital of Bishkek faces off with the city of Osh in the south, which republic. In fact, the barrier separating the Hispanic community from their “poor became notorious for the first calls for an anti-Russian religious crusade. The cousins” in Mexico may be higher than the one between them and Anglos. industrial and Russian Krasnovodsk is warily watched by Ashgabat, the cultural center for indigenous Turkmens. In Kazakhstan, Almaty is the essentially administrative Overcoming Dualism capital and the home to white-collar Kazakhs, nationalist intellectuals, and educated From the Hispanic vantage point, the annexation of Mexistan by the United States youths agitating for Islamic and national revival. By contrast, the economic capital, has had the most tremendous consequences. The new arrangement placed the large, Karaganda, is a grim proletarian city exemplifying the worst aspects of hasty socialist politically stranded Hispanic component of Mexistan’s population in a rather confusing industrialization. The city is largely a memorial to the World War II effort to provide psychological situation: they must adjust and submit as best they can to a basically alien the USSR with a new source of coal and steel, and its development was mostly carried set of laws, regulations, and cultural intrusions, annoyances that may be alleviated by out by political prisoners’ labor in prisons of the GULAG, an acronym standing for the material benefits that flow from allegiance to the most prosperous state in North Chief Adminstration of Corrective Labor. (Solzhenitzyn’s GULAG Archipelago is based America. on his personal experience in the camps in that area). Yet both Almaty and Karaganda are predominantly Russian (over 75 percent), and the interspersed pattern of settlement While in parts of Texas, the Anglo-Latino relationships may still look like a caste will doom any plans to carve separate ethnic states. The future of the region depends on system, the duality of Mexamerica seems to be partially overcome in the vibrant mix whether it will learn to live with this dual nature; otherwise, it may be forced to make and interpretation of cultures in the region. Norteno music, born of Hispanic and an impossible choice between Russia and Asia, its two estranged parents. German origins, is heard in Texas, and rock songs sung in Spanish are infiltrating “Anglo” radio stations. Even such limited fusion (or rather sharing of traits) as has Escaping Dualism occurred has created something special in the way of a generalized regional culture. Thus the Anglos have borrowed much from the Native Americans, especially in terms Today’s independent states of the region are again caught in a vise, this time a dilemma of architectural and artistic motifs, while the latter group has born the impact of of choice between the imperial frying pan and the fire of Islamic fundamentalism. To European civilization. In similar fashion, the Hispanics, including the fresh arrivals as remain faithful to Moscow in an attempt to forge a new Eurasian Empire or to side well as those whose ancestors came centuries ago, have been obliged to absorb great with pan-Islamists and pan-Turkists from Central Asia? Understandably, many see gobs of the Anglos’ material culture as well as at least a smattering of English. Of more the answer in reviving an identity independent from both neighbors. After all, the than passing interest is the appearance of a bastardized “Spanglish” usage (to the horror distinctiveness of the indigenous Kazakh culture clearly makes the grasslands a world of of linguistic purists), or the conversion of many Hispanics to the Protestant faith. But its own, not merely a transition zone between Russia and Asia. for evidence of the continuing vitality of the Hispanic culture you need only look at the growing swarm of colorful outdoor mural paintings, so much in the modern Mexican vein. 21 22 Some of the region’s intellectuals advocate the return to pre-Islamic “pure” Turkic values But what is particularly thought-provoking is the partial Hispanicization of a still related to the old totemistic religion - a cult of nature harmoniously blended with the economically and politically dominant Anglo community. Although most of its world of humans, a combination of materialism with spirituality. Quite possibly, the members may be quite reluctant to learn more than a few words of Spanish, many have greatest asset of this Oz-Turk heritage is the innate liberalism of basic clan people, taken warmly to Mexican themes in architecture, furniture, clothing and jewelry, and combining individualism with deep-rooted pragmatism. Representative of such an have adopted Spanish names for new residential developments and shopping centers. outlook is the local folklore figure of Akylman, a man of wisdom who derives his Desert landscaping with its strong regional roots has become fashionable among Anglos skill from respect for past traditions. The contrast with Russian cast of mind is very in Tucson, Phoenix, and elsewhere. Mexican cuisine may have recently diffused to profound: where Russians restlessly pursue change, the natives value continuity. The restaurants and supermarkets all over the United States, but nowhere is it more firmly difference may be seen in Kazakhstan’s conservatively pragmatic approach to reforms entrenched among non-Hispanics than in Mexistan; and one of the glories of Texas resembling the Chinese way: gradual economic liberalization without the complicating life is the invention of Tex-Mex food, a culinary complex that differs from, but richly upheavals of a political one. In the final analysis, the Kazakhs’ pragmatic individualism honors, its obvious parents. From food styles to political power, all that embodies the may pave an easier road to a market economy and steer the former nomads away from various peoples of the region mingles, argues, and coexists. the collectivist myths of both pan-islamism and communism. Another valuable part of the Kazakh heritage is their open-mindedness and tolerance. In the past, the steppe corridor was the caravan road, the Great Silk route that carried both trade and ideas. Past exposure to Christianity and Buddhism that spread along the Route might have influenced Kazakh’s receptiveness to new ideas and their gift for synthesis. This gift may be seen in the way in which earlier Kazakh intellectuals tried to build the Kazakh state on the combination of Islam and secular ideology borrowed from Kemalist Turkey, or their later idea of Islamic communism. Modern Turkey is Kazakhstan’s likeliest model in the attempt to reconcile Islamic roots with freemarket ideology through the cultivation of secular nationalism. The region also hopes to revert to its ancient role as the Silk Route, the great corridor between the West and the Far East, a dramatic realignment that would mean escape from the dilemma of choosing between Russia and Central Asia.

23 24 THEME 2: WEALTH AND WATER THEME 2: WEALTH AND WATER In attempting such an escape maneuver the region may rely on its mineral wealth. The As geological fate would have it, Mexistan contains little of gold, silver, or other pillar of the region’s economic strength is its energy resources: oil and natural gas along precious metals or gems. The dominant item within the region’s mining industry is the Caspian coasts of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, coal in Karaganda, and uranium copper, particularly in southern Arizona, which ranks as one of the world’s leading ore in the Mangyshlak Peninsula. For Kazakhstan, wealth in hydrocarbons combined producers. A rich, remarkably productive zone of petroleum and natural gas exists in with other mineral resources and low population pressure promises some chance for the Texas coastal plain to the east and south of San Antonio, and the Houston and evolving into a new Asian industrial dragon. Even now Kazakhstan is far ahead of Galveston areas have acquired major oil-refining and petrochemical facilities. Central Asia in terms of industrial development, urbanization, and income levels. As Leaving aside the easternmost fringe of the region, agriculture accounts for only a to its economic prospects as an independent state, Kazakhstan is second only to Russia, tiny fraction of the land surface. Traditional crop and irrigation systems are still pretty and its economic clout enables the republic to be something of a second power-broker much intact in those sections of the Rio Grande Valley and southwestern Arizona in post-Soviet space. that have been cultivated for many generations. Using much more elaborate, modern The down side of the success of resource-led development in the region is its new forms of engineering and irrigation, the Salt and Santa Cruz valleys now contain vulnerabilities, especially thirst for water. Karaganda only receives water via a 300 mile some intensively worked “agribusinesses,” serving national markets. Much of the canal from the Irtysh river, and the oil and uranium area on the Mangyshlak Peninsula vast remainder of Mexistan does not bring in profits in the usual sense. Some of the has to be supplied by a unique, nuclear-powered desalination plant. The Volga and region is used for low-intensity cattle and sheep ranching, and pine forests that thrive Irtysh rivers are peripheral to the region, and the major sources of water are the narrow in the higher, wetter uplands of New Mexico and Arizona also provide employment. lifelines of the Amu-Darya and Syr-Darya rivers, which begin in the mountains of Mexistan is a popular destination for tourists thanks to spectacular natural features. Central Asia and flow into the land-locked Aral Sea. Because the rivers are drawn so But the greatest source of Mexamerica’s rising power is the rapid increase of its heavily for irrigation, the Aral Sea is evaporating from the face of the earth in a global population. Smack in the middle of the legendary “Sunbelt”, it is one of the fastest environmental catastrophe. Between 1960 and the late 1980s, the Aral Sea fell about growing regions of the United States, a change reflected in its burgeoning political 40 feet and the surface area shrank by 40 percent. The sea has split into several basins, power. where the salinity of water is so high that marine life is impossible, thus eliminating The population and economic boom in the Sunbelt and expanding irrigation make the local fishing industry and leaving ports high and dry. The exposed sea bottom is a the arid region severely thirsty. The ground water and rivers are eagerly sucked up, and massive saltpan where winds pick up over 100 million tons of salt annually and deposit the Colorado River is a major victim. So great is the drawdown on the river by various it over the already saline agricultural lands of Central Asia. The very survival of the local dams and irrigation projects that little of its water actually travels the whole way along Kara-Kalpak people is in question, as severe shortages of drinking water and its 1,450 mile length to empty into the Gulf of Mexico. In 1922 a compact was created 25 26 contamination with salts and pesticides in the Kara-Kalpak republic cause an infant to share the waters of the Colorado among seven U.S. states, but arguments over its mortality rate on par with the poorer countries of Africa. use have increased with the population boom. The Colorado also belongs in part to Mexico, and a dam has been built at Morelos to drain off the last bit of water for Unfortunately, plans to save the Aral resemble other grandiose but poorly thought-out Mexican farm fields. In addition to its disappearing act, the Colorado is also suffering experiments that have colored the region’s history. The so-called Siberia-Aral water from water quality problems as salts build up from both natural and human-aggravated diversion project was to transfer fresh water from Arctic-bound Siberian rivers to sources, making it the most saline river in North America. Central Asia, initially via a 1300-mile navigable canal from the Irtysh. The water of Mexistan shares this problem with neighboring southern California, and water transfer other Siberian rivers was to be tapped later and brought as far south as Turkmenistan. schemes from as far away as the Pacific Northwest have been suggested. Everyone Dropped because of potential environmental consequences only in late 1980s, the argues about water in Mexistan. Cotton farmers are at odds with urban dwellers; project is still being pushed by the governments of the Central Asian republics. environmental concerns compete with golf courses and lawns in areas that once held These environmental challenges are set against an already vulnerable economy. only cactus; states are rivals for new projects and discuss exchanging water rights in fear The agricultural sector remains crucial, but its productivity is extremely low. The that once leased out, the water will not be available for return should future growth region is still more than half rural, and between 1959 and 1989 the proportion of demand it; and Mexico and the United States face off for water along the booming urban population increased very slowly (in Kyrgyzstan only from 34 to 38 percent). border. Furthermore, the dominance of primary industries means that economies are at the Thirst may be one of the few truly unifying characteristics along both sides of the mercy of volatile international prices. Equally serious is the dependence on the presence Mexistan spine. Another overwhelming distinction that promises to keep Mexistan a of skilled Russian specialists (likely to be the first to emigrate). The impressive mineral unique corner of North America is that whatever may happen elsewhere, this is not potential of the state of Kazakhstan lies largely in the predominantly Russian area north a melting pot. Substantial though the seepage of cultural traits may be, there is little of our region’s boundary. Any government of a more assertively ethnocentric Kazakh prospect that the divide among them will ever dissolve or become meaningless. The state would find control of those areas problematic. cultural traditions and social stamina are simply too stubborn and deep to tolerate Regardless of whether the region chooses to be a bridge or a buffer between increasingly extinction. Whatever the future may hold in store for the region, one characteristic will divergent Russia and Central Asia, it cannot afford to dispose of its Russian affiliation remain as a constant: the enduring importance of that long border that both separates altogether. Ardent Oz-Turk nationalists like to point out the relation of the Turkic word and stitches together two such fundamentally unmixable worlds. “toru” (mode of government) to the old word for “marriage.” The future may depend on whether its marriage with Russians will be a truly equal alliance or just a twist on the ancient nomadic custom of wife abduction.

27 28

THE LAND OCEAN THE LAND OCEAN Raymond Krishchyunas and Aleksei Novikov John Florin and Kathleen Braden

Krasnoyarsk is the place that always seems to be in the middle of Russia. If you pull off US-93 in south-central Idaho into Craters of the Moon To the left is western Siberia and European Russia; to the right, eastern National Monument, park at the bottom of Inferno Cone, and hike to the Siberia and the Far East. Krasnoyarsk is also in the middle of Siberia itself, summit, you have climbed into a 6000-foot high crow’s nest at the top of wedged between the oil and gas province of the West Siberian swamps the world. Around you is a sea of lava, desert soil, buttes, sagebrush, pine, and the gold and diamond-rich plateaus of Eastern Siberia. and juniper, stretching for what seems to be a thousand Idahos. The only sign of settlement is the town of Arco on the distant horizon, a long-time The horizontal east-west stretch that dominates the outline of the country is gathering point for “seekers.” It began as a junction for miners heading diversified in this place by the mighty perpendicular of the Yenisey River, going in north to Montana and the Idaho Panhandle, seeking mineral wealth from a straight line up to the Arctic Ocean. Here the TransSiberian railway crosses the the land; then it worked as an agricultural center when people took up the Yenisey, and as if admitting the particular centrality of Krasnoyarsk, the express fight against the arid western soil, trying to turn the desert brown into green stops here for twelve hours. The central location breathed life into the city less with Snake River waters. In the 1950s, Arco became a boom town again than a 100 years ago, and here one almost senses that each place in Siberia is not when the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission sought an isolated place to build a locality, but rather a location, a dot in the navigational chart for the immense the nation’s first nuclear power reactor; and finally, the town found its niche ocean of land. The rather bleak city has little history and few attractions except serving the tourists and hunters who seek out the Great American West, views of the Yenisey from its only bridge and a memorial called the “Siberian hoping to bring the frontier myth to life. Road to Exile.” The middle of the road seems to be the most logical place for a memorial to a way that leads from everywhere to nowhere. There are few signs of travelers today, and below you from Inferno Cone, the Land Ocean undulates in waves of grass and mountains. Your eyes can After Krasnoyarsk the traveler’s only companions on the boring and find no borders here. On this vast sea, there is only frontier. relentless journey across this stretch of Russia would be the staccato of rails, the stately trees of the taiga, and the mileposts that seem to celebrate the triumph of distance over human efforts in this endless expanse. 1 2 v c 300 A N 0 D miles - - ocean p Ar c tic

o \ N RT.H1 DAKOTA ., ' ~ r------~ SOUTH'-- DAKOTA

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3 4 - SIBERIA THE AMERICAN WEST The train takes almost a week to traverse this immense Land Ocean, and little wonder Big Sky Country, Great Plains, Grand Canyon, Great American Desert - there is that the notion of “Siberian distances” has become idiomatic in Russian. Spanning nothing small about the Land Ocean. Perhaps no other region of the United States eight time belts, Siberia has an area far larger than Australia. Most of land area is the inspires such clearly defined imagery, both at home and abroad. Mention the American wilderness of the taiga, the northern coniferous forest dominated by fir and larch, the West, and immediately people see cowboys, covered wagons, and cattle drives. It is a monotonous ocean of trees where human settlement is a scattered archipelago of small place that lends itself to legend, hyperbole, and promotionals; in fact, the West was islands. A line from a popular 1960s song, when the romantization of the Siberian opened up to a large degree by developers selling mythology to the American public. frontier was at its peak, conveys a rather accurate image: “the green seas of taiga are The initial element of that myth was a picture of an “empty” land, waiting for a humming under the wings of the airplane.” growing population to flex its muscle and spread from sea to sea. In the first of a series The surface of the Land Ocean is not smooth: the southern and eastern perimeter of of historic contradictions, what turned out to be the truth was that the land was hardly the region consists of rugged mountains and plateaus separating it from China and empty, and the indigenous people who used it for millennia were reduced through a the Pacific. The overall build is that of a bowl open to the Arctic, offering the cold series of wars and betrayals to tenancy on the most meager parcels of the Land Ocean. air an unimpeded road into the interior. The image of the great frozen wilderness The cowboy cattle drives that were to become one of the most enduring legends of is of course the biggest part of the popular perception of Siberia both in Russia and the Old West turned out in reality to represent a relatively brief period before rail abroad. The Land Ocean is indeed a continuation of the Arctic Ocean, part of the connections and roads integrated the West into the national economy. Perhaps in the great northern realm of the cold. Not surprisingly most of the region is underlain by an most ironic twist of truth, the rugged individualists who are supposed to have built the ocean of frozen water in permanently frozen subsoil, the “permafrost” that is the blight West by their own stamina and tenacity have been supported all along by a generous of Siberia. It not only severely constrains opportunity for agriculture, but makes the federal system of subsidies. construction and maintenance of permanent roads extremely costly, as roadbeds begin But what exactly is the West? The topography of the region is strikingly diverse. The “to flow” with each spring thaw. One-third of Siberia’s land area lies north of the Arctic rolling high plains of western Kansas are joined with the peaks of the Rockies of Circle in the tundra zone of Arctic grasslands, which in the extreme north becomes central Colorado, the stark flatness of Utah’s Salt Flats with the dramatic gorges of the almost an arctic desert with only sparse mosses and lichens for the reindeer to browse. canyonlands of northern Arizona and southern Utah. A key element of the West is Even the official designation of this area as the “Extreme North” or the “Far North” the region’s general aridity. The land from the mountains of Colorado, Wyoming, and evokes a feeling of the edge of the world, where life give way to the reign of ice and Montana eastward to the Middle West are distinguished primarily on the basis of a people huddle in layers of fur to survive. climate too dry to support the fields of grains that characterize the “heart of America.” To the west, only the Pacific-facing higher elevations are moist. Lowlands everywhere 5 6 Humans are scattered far and wide in this unlimited region. The Yamal Peninsula has are dry, intensified in some places by either a more southerly location or a leeward one person per 2.5 square miles - islanders lost in the ocean of land. In the tundra location in the shadow of especially tall mountains. It is no surprise that one of the blizzards can strike in July; the last snowstorm of spring can be easily confused with the driest places in the country, Death Valley in eastern California, is a lowland at the Those plains were like the Green waves without end first one of Fall, the clock may show noon in utter darkness, while the sun may shine at eastern foot of the highest U.S. mountains outside Alaska. ocean, a region of magnificent stretched to the north, collided, midnight. Even the areas that lie south of the Arctic Circle have climates far more harsh distances, of desolate and Finally, aridity and an often rugged topography contribute to a distinctive pattern of and blocked each other's path than the equivalent latitudes for European Russia. The four directions of the compass barren wastes, strange, soli- population distribution. After Alaska the most sparsely populated states in the United and in the grey smoke of the hori- rose reduce to just two here, as north blends and becomes synonymous with east; while tary, unexplored. Sometimes States are Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and then Nevada, all zon, it was hard to make out where everything located to the west of the Urals seems a benign south. that ocean was a sea of grassy with 12 or fewer people per square mile, compared with an average for the “lower the mountains ended and the hillocks, sometimes level with Siberia is the realm of endless winters, but the image hardly applies to the southern 48” of over 80. Throughout much of the region, people are concentrated in islands sky began...No matter how fine the flatness of dead calm, of- fringe of the region. The extreme southwest of Russian Siberia and the Virgin Lands of special opportunity - areas of irrigated agriculture, mineral extraction and refining, nature was in and of itself, no mat- tener rolling in long swells to the area of Northern Kazakhstan are a wedge of the steppes, with cruel Siberian climate but tourist development, or transportation services. The popular image of the Land Ocean ter how easily it breathes on this far-off horizon, green, tumultu- fertile soil. In functional terms, this area is the latest extension of the national granary, remains that of wide open spaces where deer and buffalo roam. A drive across the green expanse, under this blue, ous, tossing its waves of grass but the very low productivity of its wheat farming does not qualify it for inclusion region may easily reinforce that image, for indeed the impression is often that of an fathomless sky - the eye involun- under the driving winds, changing into the Breadbasket region. With the effects of continentality increasing eastward, overwhelming emptiness. To the easterner especially, used to seldom being far from the tarily searches for signs of human shape and color as swift cloud this wedge of farmland gradually degenerates into disconnected pockets of agriculture. clear evidence of human occupation, this emptiness can be almost unnerving: there existence on this green wasteland. shadows sped over the uneven The southern fringe concentrates most cities and industry, as well as three-quarters of just aren’t any people here! The truth, of course, is something quite different, since the - D.N. Mamin-Sibiryak, Gold, surface. - Stanley Vestal, Siberia’s population, and is in many ways a narrow eastern offshoot of European Russia. population of the region is strongly concentrated in a relatively few urban areas. But Minsk, Nauka i tekhnika publ., “Windwagon”, in: William Targ, In the east, it ends with the jewel of Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world, with a then reality rarely enters into images of the Land Ocean. 1984, p. 282 ed., The American West: A unique ecosystem and remarkably clean water. It is also the largest body of fresh water Treasury of Stories, Legends, on the planet - a resource that one day may become more important than Siberia’s Manifest Destiny Narratives, Songs & Ballads of legendary mineral wealth. A popular conception in the United States of the 19th century was that the ownership Western America, The World Publishing Company, Cleveland The Gift of Destiny and settlement of much of the North American continent was part of America’s “manifest destiny,” that the country and its people had a special right to continental & NYC, 1946, p. 393. Russia began its cross-navigation of the Land Ocean with the expedition of Yermak occupation. Beginning with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, which placed all of the (1581), when Moscow extended its authority to the basins of the Ob and Irtysh rivers. vast drainage basin of the Mississippi River under United States ownership, the country A mere sixty years later, Russian explorers reached the Pacific. It was in the late 16th- seemed to have a limitless supply of new western land just as settlers began to push early 17th century that most of the fortresses and stockades that later became the nuclei against the western margins of the existing national territory. In 1845 the recently 7 8 of major cities of modern Siberia were founded. The amazing swiftness of annexation independent country of Texas was annexed. A year later the Oregon Compromise with of this huge chunk of the world’s land surface was not due to cunning state enterprise Great Britain placed all of the land from what is now western Montana westward to the and foresight. It was rather a combination of adventurism (as seen in the expedition Pacific Ocean under America’s expanding control. In 1848, after the Mexican-American of Yermak, a plundering cossack leader of a privately hired and outfitted band War, the Republic of Mexico ceded what is today essentially the southwestern quadrant who “conquered” West Siberia by defeating a small Tatar khanate called Sibir) and of the United States. The outline of the 48 United States was largely complete, and serendipity (Russians entered a geopolitical vacuum: China and the Kazakh hordes were most of those new territories had been added to the nation’s political map before far to the south, and the native tribes were no match for Russians armed with firearms). significant American settlement. This swift and easy annexation established a long tradition of carelessly taking Siberia An explanation for the comparative ease with which the United States acquired its for granted as an asset somehow destined to become Russian. western half has more to with a series of fortunate differences in political goals than The goal of the initial advance into Siberia was the quest for the “hard currency” of with any special destiny. At the beginning of the century France was involved in a those times, furs, which were collected as Russia’s tribute from the subjugated native bitter struggle for control of Haiti, so the Louisiana Territory, recently acquired from population. Fur trade alone could not lead to any firm settlement, however, and the Spain, was just not that important to French interests. They were almost pleased with real annexation of Siberia occurred only with Peter the Great’s attempts to harness its the opportunity to sell the land to the United States, for it meant that they could focus wealth and to integrate Siberia into the Russian Empire. Numerous expeditions were their effort on holding their sugar-producting Caribbean colony. Texas in 1845 was outfitted by Peter and his successors to prospect for minerals and map Siberia, and largely controlled by American-born settlers who had been instrumental in defeating mining began. At the same time, the tightening of serfdom in European Russia sent Mexican forces in the War of Texan Independence (1836), and many of them had into Siberia growing numbers of fugitive peasants who formed the core of the so-called sought the opportunity to unite with their home country immediately. It was barriers “old settlers.” The substitution of deportation to Siberia for capital punishment (1753) created by the United States that largely slowed incorporation of Texas for nine years. brought in a third element of population. If Russians were outnumbered by the native Great Britain agreed to the Oregon Cession largely because it feared that an eventual peoples in 1700, by the 1730s they accounted for 70 percent of the population: Siberia flood of American settlers into the Northwest would overwhelm a relatively modest had become part of Russia in more than merely a political sense. British settlement based on the fur industry. And finally, Mexico, having lost its war with the United States, had little choice but to sell its own northwest, the land that became America’s southwest, for about 5 cents per acre - the same price that had been paid for Louisiana Territory 45 years earlier.

9 10 Submerging Native Siberians Marginalizing Native Americans The impressive ethnic diversity of the Land Ocean is reflected in the pattern of two Perhaps 2.5 million Native Americans were spread rather thinly across what was to east-west belts of native peoples, one in the north and another in the south, separated become the United States at the time of first European contact. By 1900 the ravages by a Russian wedge along the main penetration route. For the peoples of the northern of contact with Europeans had reduced their number by 90 percent. The government tier occupying the tundra and taiga zones, the traditional economy relied on fishing had followed a two-nation policy during its first century, with Native American groups and hunting; that of the much better endowed southern tier was based on nomadic repeatedly moved westward beyond the areas of European settlement, creating a Euro- cattle and horse-breeding. The fate of the native peoples in these two belts under african East and a Native American West. President Monroe had given expression to Russian rule differed even more than their traditional lifestyles. this approach in 1825 when he wrote that the Native American “should yield to the greater force of civilized population; and right it is to yield, for the earth was given to The peoples of the northern tier are officially recognized as “the small peoples of mankind to support the greater number of which it is capable.” The native population, the north,” a reflection of their sparse numbers (on the average several thousand) its numbers ever decreasing, was pushed toward the margins, away from more and special protected status. Some of these peoples belong to the Paleoasiatic group productive, more accessible areas. (the Chukchi, Koryaks, Itel’mens, Yukagirs) and are extremely ancient, relics who were pushed into the north by much later arrivals from the south. The societies of For a time the Land Ocean, viewed as the least desirable portion of the West, was shamanist native northeners had little incentive to change as the risk of discarding the bypassed by this expansion. The region’s native population - the Crow, Cheyenne, accumulated experience of generations was too great. The fragility of these “frozen” Arapahoe, and Comanche hunting buffalo and antelope along the dry margins of the cultures which were perfectly but rigidly acclimated to their equally fragile northern grasslands; and the Utes, Paiutes, and Shoshone, living on a diet of deer, small game, ecosystems spelled doom under Russian impact. Although Russians were paternalistic and wild edible plants - were briefly ignored. Eventually the open-range cattle industry, so long as the natives paid tribute, epidemics and the introduced addiction to alcohol dry farming, and minerals attracted American settlers and the process of removal began to decimate their numbers. Over the last 300 years their populations remained crept across the region. Huge blocks of land earlier set aside for Native Americans static or even dwindled, and added to this loss was the destruction of the natural were reduced to smaller and smaller parcels. The two-nation concept was abandoned, environment. It takes many years to heal a scar left in the tundra by the passage of a replaced by a reservation policy that required the indigenous population to surrender single caterpillar tractor, or to restore spawning grounds in rivers maimed by mining. their general claim to the land and placed them on clearly defined and generally The Soviet government created huge territorial autonomies for the peoples of the North rather small reserves. By the late 1890s nearly all Native Americans had been moved that account for 71 percent of Siberia’s area, but only 19 percent of its population. The to some 268 reserves, most of them in the most marginal portions of the West. In a influx of Europeans to develop mineral resources has meant that now the proportion of separate current, the 1887 Dawes Act encouraged Native Americans to opt out of the native population nowhere exceeds 15 percent. Native peoples are raising a demand for communal lands of the reservation, claim what had been reservation land with the same smaller territories with exclusive rights to the use of land and resources, in fact almost 160 acres provided for Whites under the Homestead Act, and become farmers. Nearly 11 12 reservations. The scattered settlement pattern of the small northern peoples is the major cause 100 million acres were lost to reservations in this process, with perhaps a third of all of their loss of culture, since the teaching of native languages becomes an almost Native Americans seizing the opportunity for independence. unsurmountable problem of logistics. Founding even a single school can ensure the Unfortunately, most of their land was unsuited to agriculture, and they soon gave up survival of a native language, but is not always possible. Young people often refuse to Almighty Spirit, Noomy-Torum, the attempt and sold the land if they could. Having rejected the reservation system, After a long time, Tsichtinako learn their own language. Worlds of local culture are hidden on the bottom of the Land was busy creating the Earth...he they became a landless, poor population of ranch and farm workers or urban laborers. spoke to them, "What are we go- took off his precious girdle with Ocean beneath the tidal wave of modern “civilization.” ing to do now concerns the earth. heavy buttons and girded it around Today many Native Americans in the West live either in relative deprivation on We are going to make the moun- While the fate of the tribal societies in northern Siberia justly arouses public sympathy, the Earth to fortify it. Where the reservations or in poverty in urban areas. Reservations, often inaccessible and lacking tains."...After all this was done, it is often overlooked how different was the course of history for the far more numerous Tsichtinako spoke again and told girdle touched the Earth there resources, offer scant opportunity for improvement. Full integration into the society appeared the Ural Mountains- just south Siberian peoples (Buryats, Altayans, Khakass, Tuvinians and Yakuts). These them, "Now that you have all the and economy of urban American has also been difficult. Still, a very real Native in the middle of the Earth. Where Turkic and Mongol-speakers (Buddhist with the exception of the Orthodox Yakuts) mountains around you with plains, American renaissance is a part of this environment. It has taken many forms - a return mesas, and canyons, you must there were buttons - there ap- occupy the southern band of mountains and forest-steppes adjacent to Mongolia. peared lakes. Live and be blessed to communalism, a revival of the reservation as a main base of life and culture, a rise in make the growing things of these Their numbers grew from about 200,000 in the 17th century to 1.3 million in 1989. every man, every animal, every bird. native-owned businesses, an increasing wish to preserve traditional institutions, and a places...She said they would find Yakuts and Buryats learned the techniques of sedentary agriculture and the tricks of in their baskets cottontails, jack vibrant activism seeking broader recognition of Native Americans as a part of the fabric "Noomy-Torum's Girdle", Mansi trading from Russians. These people perfectly adapted to Russian rule and thrived rabbits, antelope, and water deer. of American life. fairy tale (Native Siberian tribe) by exploiting the more primitive native groups. In fact, their role in driving out the They were told to give life to these animals. in: Galina Smirnova, Fairy Tales smaller peoples of the North was greater than that of Russians. Many were assimilated of Siberian Folks, translated by THEME 1: THE FRONTIER AS MYTH AND SYMBOL Olga Myazina and Galina Shchit- by Yakuts, nomadic cattle-herders who began to migrate into the Lena basin not long "The Origin Myth of the Acoma" nikova, Krasnoyarsk, Vital Publish- before the Russians. Under Russian rule they expanded their territory to the modern The notion of the West as frontier central to the formation of American character (Puebla tribe of western New Mex- ers, 1992, p. 138. boundaries of the Sakha (Yakut) republic, which is larger than India in area. Yet, due to is perhaps the core myth of the United States. The West became the symbol of ico) in Alan R. Velie, ed., American Slav immigration even these more resilient Siberian peoples account for only a quarter the qualities that set Americans apart from those who had not the opportunity Indian Literature: An Anthology, University of Oklahoma Press, to a third of the populations of their territorial autonomies, while Slavs account for 90 to experience the frontier. Europeans might have their long history and ancient 1979, pp. 21-22. percent of the Land Ocean’s population. institutions, but they could not match the self-reliance, the special quality and importance of each individual American forged by the frontier experience. THEME 1: THE FRONTIER AS MYTH AND SYMBOL The emergence of the idea of the West as the creative caldron of America began soon The very name “Siberian” suggests to Russians a tough and independent character after the American revolution. Crevecouer in Letters from an American Farmer wrote shaped by the stern life of colonists. This image of the classic Siberian as a bearded in the 1780s of Americans as a new people, certainly not all good but vital nonetheless, peasant, reliable, simple, and solid in his ways, was kept alive by the efforts of the Soviet 13 emerging from the experience with the wilderness. As the United States grew during 14 “village prose” circle, whose best-known members were Valentin Rasputin from Irkutsk the 19th century, and especially as the East developed into a more urban and urbane and movie producer-actor-writer Vasiliy Shukshin from the Altai. One of the favorite seaboard, interest in the West as a special place blossomed. Eastern writers almost plot lines of Shukshin is that of a dashing young Siberian lad without a penny in his flooded the country with an endless series of Western stories and heros, some based pocket who “conquers” Moscow, a story in essence the expression of Siberian frontier in fact but many pure fiction. From James Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales identity as opposed to corrupt and false Moscow. Portraying Siberia as a reliable rear to Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill Cody, America’s fascination with the Frontier seemed guard and frequent savior of ungrateful European Russia has a grain of truth. Such insatiable. Cody himself gained considerable additional fame and fortune by gathering writings have far wider than regional appeal, which may be explained by the desire of together a collection of his friends and acquaintances, plus a herd of animals, and non-Siberians to believe that somewhere out east there still is that land of pure rivers, touring the East and Europe with his Wild West show. This obsession with the West great wealth, and strong people who will never let them down. did not end with the passing of the century. Television and American movies have mined the rich possibilities of stories about the West for decades, with John Wayne the The work of another known Siberian, the poet Yevtushenko, demonstrates a quite embodiment of the American hero. different facet of the Siberian image. His Siberia is the “Wild East” of tramps, vagabonds, and outlaws. Even at the height of Soviet totalitarianism, Siberia was the The West of popular image is as much an experience as a place, moving with settlement place where a man without a passport could easily get lost and find work. Hobos and allowing for a constant repetition of the western experience. The Land Ocean may alternating chance jobs with petty crime and drinking sprees are familiar local figures simply be the last West, the final place (outside Alaska) in the country where Americans to this day. The Land Ocean has the dubious distinction of having record-high levels of could be renewed and energized by the frontier experience and by meeting a series of alcoholism and crime, and the rude mores of motley work crews in its logging camps physical challenges: great distances, arid climate, rugged terrain, and an earth difficult and mines are well known. Part of this spirit of frontier lawlessness stems from Siberia’s to subdue. As writer Tom Mathews described it: “you have to grasp the seductive power past as the land of exiles, many of whom were deported for life or stayed by choice in of the Western landscape. Drive over the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming or stand the rough and tumble Siberian scene when freed. at 7000 feet on Mesa Verde...look out and each mesa is an acropolis, each canyon a cathedral.” The mixture of steady peasants and unruly outlaws accounts for the lack of a clear and widely accepted image of the Land Ocean. Furthermore, until recently, the region never Even a tenacious shrub called artemisia tridentata (better known as sagebrush) has was the country’s only or even most important frontier. In contrast to the southern come to symbolize the West, and the population of the United States is probably the frontiers of Russia, it does not evoke the heroic mythology of colonial wars, Cossack proud owner of more of it than any other plant. A single sagebrush may live 100 years, chivalry, or Christian triumphs over Islam. Beginning with Peter’s projects, most of the surviving on winter snow waters and tapping water below with its extensive roots. region’s population were brought there to serve state interests: even Siberian Cossacks Perhaps in its lonely determination and individualism the tough plant has come to were little different from the regular army. The region faithfully served and furthered represent the qualities of western life that permeate American mythology about the the strength of that same state whose dictates it instinctively opposed. In the Soviet region. 15 16 period, the need to shift population eastward led to the manufacturing of a new If sagebrush still thrives in the West, the buffalo has almost disappeared from what was image of the region as the land of youth. Here was a wilderness that needed to be once the grasslands of the Great Plains. Early travelers could not have imagined that “conquered,” the romantic lure of opening new lands and a test for one’s willpower and extinction could even be a remote possibility; the buffalo population on the North physical strength ( and a great service to the motherland, of course). Land Ocean is American continent was estimated at 45 to 60 million before European-Americans still the land of the young, and yet it is a strange frontier. Several times nearly forgotten began to eliminate the herds. More than one million per year were killed in the latter and then rejuvenated, Siberia seems trapped in “eternal youth” even though in terms half of the 19th century, and in 1883 the last great herd was wiped off the Land of Russian history it is 400 years old. It may now be losing population, and the scarred Ocean. In the National Bison Range in Montana and other centers, the buffalo is now look of its once pristine nature betrays an advanced age, but the region is still the ever- protected, another symbol of the stubborn Western spirit. hopeful debutante with naive visions of a great and special future. However, in a blow against American myth, the people who inhabit this vast region Although the prevailing image of the Land Ocean is that of a great wilderness, it is in are hardly rural folks. Most people in the West are classed as urban by the U.S. census fact one of the most urbanized parts of the country. In Northern Siberia the cities (such and live in a series of scattered city dots on the map of the Land Ocean. For example, as Murmansk and Noril’sk, the world’s two largest cities located beyond the Arctic the majority of people in Colorado live in a string of cities at the western edge of circle) stand as solitary icebergs in the emptiness of the Land Ocean. The profiles of the grasslands along the Front Range from Pueblo in the south through Colorado cities in southern Siberia are more diverse, and bear testimony to the gradual southward Springs and Denver to Boulder and Greeley in the north. Similarly, the great majority shift of the all-important east-west trunk road. The original administrative and cultural of Utahans live in cities in an irrigated lowland along the east side of Utah Lake and capitals of Siberia (Tobol’sk, Tomsk, and Yakutsk) were beaded along the early “road the Great Salt Lake from Provo through Salt Lake City to Ogden in the north. Most of chains” that went well north of the future course of the TransSiberian. Bypassed by residents in Nevada live in the Las Vegas urban area, and many of the rest live in Reno. the railway, they afterwards grew little, preserving quaint old church-studded streets Why should the land of “home-on-the-range” be actually quite urbanized? The answer and the atmosphere of Siberia’s first cultural centers, where refinement was brought is essentially a list of many of the reasons why cities exist in the first place. Denver, the (somewhat paradoxically) by Russia’s early political exiles. Mile High City and easily the region’s largest urban area, has become a major service In contrast, the cities along the Transiberian from Tyumen’ to Krasnoyarsk experienced and administration center for a large portion of the country’s western midsection. explosive growth in the 20th century. During the Second World War numerous The Denver Federal Center is said to be the largest single concentration of federal factories (evacuated into this deep rear) laid the foundations for diversified modern government operations outside Washington. Like a number of other western cities industries, better linked to European Russia than to the resource frontier farther (Albuquerque and Ogden are examples), Denver has become a major service and north. The populations of focally located Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk grew from warehousing center for transcontinental shipping. Its airport is one the country’s about 60 thousand before the Revolution to respectively 1.4 and 0.9 million by 1989. busiest. Like nearly every other state capital in the country, Denver has grown in Novosibirsk with its famous Akademgorodok (a city of science, housing the Siberian response to the increasing role of state government. Denver has also become a major 17 18 branch of the Academy of Sciences) has developed into the new cultural capital of regional retailing center, with some shoppers willing to travel hundreds of miles to sift Siberia. through the delights of the city’s stores and shopping malls. Cities aside, some of the oldest islands in the Land Ocean are the villages and But it is ultimately our myths about western heroes which permeate national place homesteads of ancient settlers, many of them schismatic Old-Believers who retreated imagery of the Land Ocean. The image of an ability to deal with life’s problems without from religious persecutions ever deeper into the taiga. (Symbolic of the remoteness the ever-present help of society, and certainly without government assistance, is popular possible only in Siberia is the recent case of an Old-Believers family, discovered in the with many inhabitants of the West. Is the myth valid? In a real sense the answer must taiga, who had still not heard the news of the 1917 Revolution). The youngest islands be “of course not.” Westerners today are every bit as dependent on government support are those of mining and industry, many of them small company towns grouped into as residents of any section of the country. Yet the myth persists. Not a few of the flood archipelagos of almost dictatorial rule by a Moscow ministry. The notorious GULAG of tourists so important to the regional economy are there in hopes of sharing the archipelago adds to this mix its own islands of penal colonies. The popular image of western experience. Cowboy hats and boots are common Western garb, even for folks the region features fettered convicts and political exiles, but like much of Siberia’s who seldom see let alone ride a horse. The West has given America resources, space, and portrait, this image weaves myth with reality. Truly enough, since the 17th century always - a fresh start. it was the land of “damnation and chains” that culminated with Stalin’s forced labor camps. But before the Stalinist terror, the proportion of convicts in Siberia seldom THEME 2: THE BOOMS AND BUSTS exceeded 5 percent, only one-fifth of them political exiles. The stream of settlers was Near the headwaters of the Missouri River at Three Forks, a skeleton town called always dominated by free people who came on their own will. Throughout the length Gallatin City remains as a monument to human foolishness and greed. This place in of Russia’s history, Siberia’s role was twofold: the voluntary refuge of non-conformists Montana is not atypical of the hundreds of ghost towns which cobweb the western who fled from the system and the forced destination of those who openly threatened it. landscape. Eastern land speculators created Gallatin in the 1860s, hoping to cash in on While Siberia served as a safety valve for the state, it also satisfied the quest for freedom service needs for prospectors. Unfortunately, no one thought to check the navigability in the Russian soul. In Land Ocean there was room for all. of the river until after thousands of dollars were invested in building the town. Only then did the founders realize that the waterfall at Great Falls prevented boats from THEME 2: THE BAM AND BUSTS reaching this far upstream. Gallatin was abandoned almost as soon as it was built, a The wealth of the Land Ocean has long been perceived as a strategic reserve - a tangible example of the precarious nature of economic life on the Land Ocean. safeguard of Russia’s future. Frenetic campaigns to tap the rich storehouse followed whenever the geopolitical situation demanded. The tidal rhythm of active booms interspersed with calm interludes punctuates the whole history of the Land Ocean. One of the most recent booms of activity on a grandiose scale is the BAM: the Baikal- 19 20 Amur Mainline, cutting across Siberia to the Far East and representing one of the most A Resource-Based Economy ambitious railroad engineering challenges in history. Technical problems, setbacks, and The economic structure of the West for many years resembled that of any massive investment requirements for the BAM show that collecting the riches of the underdeveloped region: raw materials were sent out; manufactured goods and Land Ocean does not come easily, and the region’s economy has been on a roller coaster investment capital sent in. The Land Ocean at first held far less interest for the ride from the beginning. westward drift of American settlement than did the new Pacific margins of the country. A Resource-Based Economy The moister lands of the Willamette Valley in present-day Oregon, or the bountiful opportunities of California after the discovery of gold in 1848, drew people westward. The fur bonanza that followed the initial conquest was the first high tide in Land Between 1845 and 1860 an estimated 200,000 Americans journeyed westward into the Ocean’s economic history. For a while this “soft gold” constituted the bulk of Muscovy’s region. Most were bound for California or the Oregon Territory. Only Mormon Utah foreign trade and created the economic foundation on which the Romanov dynasty attracted a significant settlement within the Land Ocean. Trails in the region (such forged a Russian state. However, the depletion of furs soon put the region backstage as the famous Oregon Trail and its California Cutoff) were not routes to this dry and until it was reawakened by Peter’s reforms which gave Siberia a new role as Russia’s often rugged land, but merely across it. mineral treasure chest. The first silver and copper mines and smelters originated in the To our day, most major transport routes in the interior West still connect east with Altai and served as a major source for coinage, and the lower Lena became the country’s west rather than north with south. Five major interstate highways lace the region in prime gold-producing area. This emphasis on precious metals highlights Siberia’s a strikingly even series of east-west ribbons. The region’s railroads have an even more longtime role as Moscow’s emergency hoard of resources. dramatic east-west orientation. Lines of transport have integrated the Land Ocean with After this burst of development the Land Ocean experienced a century of calm. The the rest of the country better than they have joined the sections of the region itself. construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the 1890s had momentous consequences, Exploiting the resources of the West has always been a transportation challenge, and but only for the southern fringe of Siberia, where a swelling tide of peasant settlers a map of America’s interstate highway system, railroads, and air routes shows that the claimed their homesteads, while in the rest of Land Ocean the population grew even Land Ocean is still an area sparsely served by all three. more slowly than in European Russia. The TransSiberian itself was largely built for While for those making their way to the gold fields of California or the Klondike the strategic reasons to secure a link with the Far Eastern provinces newly annexed in 1858- Land Ocean was merely an obstacle, others later found riches by dipping into the 60. The intervening spaces of the Land Ocean were perceived as a mere obstacle to be “waters.” Nevada was the site of the Comstock Lode, and Virginia City, Montana, soon overcome. Remoteness, as well as European Russia’s wealth in resources essential to the boomed to a population of 20,000. Gold, silver, lead, zinc, and copper drew miners to Industrial Revolution, again left Siberia forgotten, one of the least developed regions the West, and in later years, tungsten, molybdenum, and uranium were added to the of Imperial Russia. Reflecting this lack of interest, the region’s southern boundary list. Butte, Montana, became famous for sitting on “The Richest Hill in the World,” with China remained nearly unchanged from 1689 to the Soviet period, when Siberia 21 22 belatedly became Russia’s main frontier. In the Soviet years, the depletion of resources in the European part of a quickly as a wealth of metals were mined from the city for over a century. Copper came out of industrializing Russia along with strategic concerns prompted the movement of the the Bingham Mine near Salt Lake City, and vast oil shales were discovered in Utah and economic center of gravity eastward, and in the period from the 1930s to 1970s, the Colorado. The gluttony was promoted by the Mining Law of 1872, which facilitated Land Ocean experienced its greatest boom ever. Even without the southern fringe, the easy and cheap rights to mining on public lands. region’s population grew at twice the rate of the country as a whole and many new The mines created fortunes for some people, but also their share of headaches. Local cities emerged. environments were wrecked by polluted runoff and topsoil torn off to create open pit Thus, the new Kuznetzk coal basin (Kuzbas) was developed as an alternative to the mines. Smelters smothered vegetation, buildings, and human lungs alike in arsenic and country’s old metallurgical bases in a mere ten years. Between 1926 and 1939 the other poisons. Mine tailings piled up on the landscape. The West and the United States Kuzbas centers of Novokuznetzk and Kemerovo, grew from about 5 thousand to as a whole are still dealing with the cleanup cost of the mining bonanza of the Land 150-200 thousand population. Today the Kuzbas accounts for 37 percent of coal Ocean. production in Russia and has three metallurgical plants, two of which are the largest Timber extraction has played a large role in some local economies of the West, but in the country, yet in another sense, this young industrial area already appears to be perhaps the tradition most branded into public folklore of the region is cattle raising. worn-out. From the mid-1970s to the early 1990s the proportion of Siberian industrial Ranchers have in the past been in close competition with both farmers and sheep output turned out by Kuzbas shrank twofold, while thoroughly neglected amenities graziers; more recently, battles are being fought between those who still favor federal and dismal atmospheric pollution caused an absolute loss of population. Novokuznetzk lands for cattle and those who believe the practice creates too much environmental and Kemerovo rank among least desired urban places in Russia. damage. Similar features of a failed utopia are evident in Tyumen’ oblast - Russia’s hopeful oil In the 1800s, millions of wild Texas longhorn cattle fed on the open ranges of Texas. emirate. The area’s development as the linchpin of a crash program to boost Soviet The tradition of rounding them up for the drive overland to railroads in Missouri and oil and gas output began only in the late 1960s, and by the 1970s it appeared to be Kansas began in 1866, spawning the era of the cowboy. But almost from the beginning, a spectacular success as the area came to account for two-thirds of oil and more than cattle raising on the open country has been hazardous. Open warfare erupted between one-half of natural gas production in the former USSR. Oil and natural gas exports cattle ranchers (mostly Mormon or Anglo-American) and sheep herders, who were from Land Ocean provided the bulk of Soviet hard currency earnings and brought the often of Mexican origin. The cattlemen accused the sheep of ruining the rangeland country a modicum of prosperity. They propped up the senile Soviet regime, just as furs by their habit of eating the grass right down to the roots. Other disputes arose over had bolstered the early Romanov reign. But this bonanza was short-lived. In a hurry ownership of unbranded cattle on the range and the desire of farmers to build fences. to skim the cream off the best oilfields, the reserves were overtapped and the oil fields But perhaps the greatest threat came from the cattlemen themselves, whose confidence damaged, to be abandoned for new ones beyond the Arctic Circle. Despite this in the ability of the Land Ocean to support the herds was soon proven foolish. The 23 24 extension, in the 1990s the production of oil in West Siberia has been declining, and early 1880s were a time of deceptively mild winters, and grazing pressures grew as more boom towns like Surgut or Urengoi are pondering their future. and more cattle were released. In 1870 a steer could derive enough nourishment from 5 acres of grassland; by 1880, 50 acres were required. The animal population level was Although industrial areas like Western Siberia received huge infusions of investment, already too high by 1885 when one of the worst winters known hit the plains, followed the race to open them up meant that creating decent amenities for migrants was always by a second bad season in 1886. Up to one-third of the herds perished. neglected. Hastily built and lacking a lived-in feeling, the cities appear makeshift, adding to a false image of the region’s eternal youth: everything seems to lie ahead. But The precarious nature of the meat industry here continued up to the 1980s, when maturity is never reached, as neglected areas move directly into senility, and the wave of a decline in domestic demand for beef occurred at the same time that exports to new development rolls deeper into the wilderness. foreign markets were constrained by rising exchange rates for American currency. Debt problems for farmers and ranchers in the West increased as costly, capital- and The opening up of the Land Ocean required connecting it into the national economy, energy-intensive techniques drove many out of business. Land prices declined as well, but that has not been an easy task. Obviously, the most important linkages run east- and communities whose economic base depended on their role as agricultural service west. The backbone of the system and Siberia’s umbilical chord to the nation is still centers were hurt by spin-off effects. In a final “bust,” energy prices fell in the 1980s, the TransSiberian railway, easily the world’s record holder in terms of the bulk of cargo and plans for development of western oil shale reserves turned out to be not only moved. The second major east-west route into the region is the legendary Northern environmentally unpalatable, but also plain uneconomical. Sea Route along the Arctic coast, dependent on powerful icebreakers accompanying convoys of ships, and available only a few months of the year. Between these two great The New West was now dependent on urban-dwelling service employees, ready and routes the only links are those of the world’s longest domestic air-routes, now managed willing to spend money in the countryside on weekends and for vacations, but firm by the sometimes-risky regional successors to Aeroflot. to demand that the same countryside not be deforested, strip mined, or overgrazed. Meanwhile, the rural population of farmers, ranchers, and miners were aging and The preponderance of east-west routes accounts for the weak link between southern becoming fewer in numbers as landholdings were consolidated, giving way to large and northern Siberia. While the southern fringe has a developed urban-industrial operations that could survive the financial crunch of the later 1980s. Tourism has economy, the rest is still a poorly attached appendage. The horizontal bands of Siberian grown to be a major income source, not only in states such as Nevada which have territory are stitched together by the vital seams of north-flowing rivers. Frozen for nine long sought tourist dollars in the form of gambling and legalized prostitution, but months a year they become roadbeds. Mortally dangerous, the work of truckers on also in places like Montana, only recently emerging as a prime travel destination Siberia’s famous highway to Yakutsk and Magadan has made them into folklore figures. for people who enjoy the outdoors. Pressure from sightseers and outdoor sports Overall, the map of Siberia seems to be as sketchy as its cities are makeshift: scattered enthusiasts sometimes requires developments that are not always benign for the western blots of cities or oilfields and disconnected traces of transport lines do not form a environment, and the culture imported by urbanite western tourists may not sit well cohesive entity. with local folks. 25 26 For all its vicissitudes, the Land Ocean remains the country’s economic mainstay and An example of this employment-base shift is Kellogg, Idaho, a town whose original hope. With 20 percent of Russia’s population, the region accounts for 40 percent of name was “Noah Kellogg’s Jackass,” after an animal of the man who discovered the its exports. Taking into account the crucial dependence of most ex-Soviet republics lode that created the Bunker Hill Mine. Beginning operations in 1885, Bunker Hill on Siberian oil, the region is vital to the economic re-integration of the former USSR; brought lead, silver, and zinc out of the mountains, but in 1981 economic change, Tyumen’ wields more power as a defacto CIS capital than Minsk. Besides fuels, the environmental concerns, and resource depletion called for closing down Bunker Hill, Land Ocean supplies the bulk of Russian diamond and gold production and exports. throwing 2000 people out of work. Today, Kellogg is the site of the Silver Mountain Such areas as Noril’sk and the Kola peninsula provide the bulk of strategic non-ferrous Resort, a destination ski resort. Tourist money is filling in the income gap for many metals. Reserves of coal and natural gas in southern Siberia and Yakutia are among the places in the Land Ocean, but even as the visitors come for an “authentic” experience, world’s greatest, and may acquire international importance in the future. But even if they are by their very presence changing the face of the West. the region becomes a resource semi-colony of the western world rather than of Russia, it will hardly escape its boom-and-bust predicament. Who Should Own the West?

Who Should Own Siberia? An historic irony in the American West is that the federal government became the biggest landlord in the region, despite the fact that no one seemed to want it that way The extreme remoteness of Siberia led to a sense of separateness and a desire for until Teddy Roosevelt’s era. Since the 19th century, many American citizens in the West autonomy. This notion was even given official support under Catherine the Great, have complained about government interference in private ownership rights; but at who instituted the “Siberian Kingdom” in the 1760s, envisioned as a self-supporting the same time, the U.S. government has been attempting to get rid of vast tracts of the dominion with separate currency. Siberian coinage stopped in 1781, but until the Land Ocean, a goal evidenced by various pieces of legislation giving away the rights to Revolution there existed a movement of the so-called “regionalists,” who foresaw the farm, mine, and ranch public land. prosperity of Siberia in federal union or secession from Russia. Even ethnic differences A landlord-style government, especially one based in the East, was not the image of were cited in support of autonomy, as a large proportion of the old Siberian population America that most nineteenth century citizens held, and almost from the beginning were of mixed Slav-native origin and felt little affinity with Russia proper. In recent there was pressure to give over rights of utilizing the land to private interests. If times, living literally on top of the rich mineral wealth combined with the strict control ownership is defined as use, then the federal government has been a give-away agent of of resources by the central authorities strengthened the local feeling of a victimized historic proportions. Land rights were ceded to the railroads, to land speculators, and region, from which resources and profits are unfairly taken. in perhaps the biggest gift of all, to agriculturalists. Congress passed the Homestead While Siberians quite justly feel that their region was historically neglected and used, Act in 1862, allowing any man or woman who applied to own 160 acres of public land some also blindly accept the simplistic notion that Siberian oil belongs to those who that had not yet been otherwise appropriated. Claims continued well into the twentieth happen to live in Tyumen’ oblast or that Yakutian diamonds belong to residents of century until 1934 when the Bureau of Land Management took over stewardship of 27 28 Yakutia. They would happily see themselves as oil or diamond “emirates” emerging the remaining acres. As a result of the federal policies, land prices fell during much of from the chaos of Soviet devolution. The Yamal-Nenets “republic” and Yakutia have the last century, and land speculation was difficult to combat. The ideal of the small, both declared sovereignty over land and resources. The stakes of such struggles for family homestead gradually gave way to the economic realities of corporate agriculture. resource ownership are quite high: Yakutia (which has reclaimed the old name “Sakha”) Farm size was not the only geographic myth that was perpetuated on the Land Ocean. provides 99 percent of Russia’s diamond output, about one-fourth of such gems mined Despite the fact that the environment of the West demanded a different style of in the world. Since such a small proportion of the population is non-Slavic, ownership land management, people continued to operate by rules learned in the humid East. claims may be more related to local managers and politicians’ ambitions than to the Arguments over rights to water, mineral resources, and grasslands occurred among rights held by indigenous peoples. In the case of Yamal-Nenets, only one pecent of the private citizens, sometimes with violent results. Multiple use management means population is native “northern people.” reconciling interests that may be irreconcilable, and battles between environmentalists In fact, most residents of northern Siberia are temporary drifters, modern nomads and ranchers over grazing rights on public lands erupted into the so-called “Sagebrush attracted by the “long ruble” of northern wage differentials. Their tour of duty finished, Rebellion” in the 1970s. In Nevada alone, almost 90 percent of the land is under they leave the region to settle down with accumulated savings in a more welcoming federal ownership, and the state government began to argue for transfer of rights to the climate. The majority of oil workers in the north of Tyumen’ oblast are even flown there local level, a call to arms soon taken up by other western states. for their workshifts from the European part of the country or Tyumen’ city (900 miles There is a fair amount of pretending going on in the traditional economy of the Land away). Without a population attached to the land, the land is in turn poorly attached Ocean. The image of the region pretends to rugged individualism and hard work, yet to the nation; and the colonials are pressing to renegotiate relations with the mother the region receives constant subsidies from people in other parts of the United States. country. Many local folks pretend that they want no interference from the federal government, The Land Ocean clearly gives the country more than it receives. But with its yet public ownership, federal spending, and management of lands have been a mainstay insatiable need for infrastructure investment and state-subsidized transport and its for building much private wealth. The economic bases of the Old West seem to reflect requirement for special salary incentives, it is also strongly dependent on the center. local identity, but the investment for creating these activities long depended on people The predominance of large-scale economic enterprise in strategically important sectors outside the region. And finally, folks historically have pretended that the resources and means that Siberia will long lag behind other regions in privatization. What Siberia territory of the West have been unlimited. Like most aspects of the West, there is a seeks today is not so much fair treatment as special privileges, and to get that, Siberians bigness even in the boom and bust cycles of the economy. Some years have been good need a strong central government. The regional bravado about self-sufficiency and ones, some miserable; few have been what one would call “average.” But then what isolationism have been born largely out of the Land Ocean’s self-promoted myth of a could ever be ordinary in a place made from myth? perennial frontier. 29 30

THE PACIFIC GATEWAY* THE PACIFIC GATEWAY* Aleksei Novikov and Raymond Krishchyunas Kathleen Braden

To fishermen or who sail down Russia’s Pacific coast, the forests of wild Nature is so untamed on the Pacific beaches of Washington State that you oak that line the mountains of the Lazovsky Nature Reserve must look like can get killed just by walking along the shore. Signs at the few areas of a landscape painted on an ancient Chinese porcelain plate. The leaves coast that are accessible from land warn people about deadly logs of giant meet in an unbroken canopy over the slopes, and along the ground grow cedar and Douglas fir which are hurled like missiles onto the beach by the mushrooms of unearthly size, shape, and color. Hiking through the reserve waves rolling in from the Gulf of Alaska. But the brave soul who dares to is not easy because there are no paths and only carved marks on tree walk the rocks and sand will be rewarded by the spectacle of the largest trunks from previous travelers show the way. Lianas, or vines, twine around ocean on earth, and will find on the shoreline scavenged fishing floats and the tall trees, and among the leaves on the forest floor, wild boar and debris printed with strange Oriental characters, telling the tale of what lies spotted deer still run, and black bear perch up in the branches, munching just beyond the sunset. If you could look far to the north to Cape Flattery acorns. Through the underbrush of this forest, the Siberian tiger roams, the and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, or down to the ports of Puget Sound, you largest tiger in the world. But in recent years, this region has opened up to might get a glimpse of container ships making their way from Korea and the outside world and the tiger of Russia’s Pacific may not survive to see Japan, or tugboats pulling barges up the Inside Passage to Alaska, or the end of this century. Poachers have decimated it, eager to meet market perhaps even a huge Trident nuclear submarine going down Hood Canal demands in China and throughout the Far East for tiger skin and bones to the base at Bangor, for this region is the strategic “corner” of America. believed to have magic medicinal powers. Only a handful of tigers still hunt Over your shoulder may be only the back door to the rest of the continent, deer and goral here, often trapping their prey in the Pacific waters with the but in front lies a gateway to Asia and the Pacific. high cliffs of the mountains to their back. Out along the shoreline, a naval vessel is sailing down to Vladivostok, and there are ball-like floats washed ashore from Japanese fishing nets and * This chapter was alternatively called “Pacific Gateway” & “Pacific Edge” during the writing of Beyond Borders other tell-tale plastic signs of civilization encroaching from the Pacific Rim. But today the sun is warm, the waves gently lap the shore, and along the 1 sand the prints of the tiger lead into the sea. 2 <"~ r et· 1 c ·c Edge

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o,_____ ,.3oo miles Pac i f i c Edge ocean 3 4 - OUTPOST IN THE FAR EAST UTOPIA IN THE NORTHWEST The image of a precarious strategic outpost pervades the Russian perception of the The Pacific Northwest is the place of the great getaway, a region described by Alan Pacific Edge, a region which opened up with a vengeance after the break-up of the Furst as “a mystical zone of indifference, a place so remote, so utterly far away from USSR. Once isolated by location and the strong presence of the Russian military, the everything that even your private demons will get lost trying to find you. All the Far East of Russia now attracts foreign investors, as well as get-rich-quick hopefuls refugees out here have at least one thing in common: in their secret hearts they’re and a sinister criminal element that has flourished in the post-Soviet period. Clinging people who don’t want to be found.” But getting away from it all is becoming more to the edge of the continent and facing the Pacific more than Moscow, the region difficult in western Washington and Oregon, northern California, and even Alaska has exploded into the chaos, riskiness, and excitement of a real frontier. In the once- as more people discover the natural beauty and amenities of the region. What has sealed military port of Vladivostok, Nissans and Toyotas now drive the potholed sometimes been termed the most livable part of America is experiencing rapid streets alongside Russian-made Zhigulis; sailors walk the boardwalk next to visiting population and economic growth, to the point where arguments over development businessmen from Taiwan; and local “entrepreneurs” talk joint ventures with foreigners have become a major political issue. eager to cash in on the warehouse sale of Russia’s resources. The Cascade Mountains serve as very effective borders of the region to the east. Such scenes stand in real contrast to more distant times, when the expansion of Russia Blocking the Pacific rains from entering the estranged eastern portion of the states, ran into unusually tough resistance in this youngest of frontier regions as well as they set off a chain reaction of differentiation that begins with climate and vegetation, competition from other powers, suffering serious setbacks as a consequence. The initial runs into separate economies and population densities, and ends in deepset cultural Russian conquest was slowed even by the landscape of the Far East. The rivers that differences. Eastern Washington and Oregon are absolute parts of the vast Land Ocean conveniently bore Russian explorers across Siberia stop short of the Pacific, which is - in terms of how they make a living, in the appearance of the landscape, and by their separated from the interior by an uninterrupted chain of rugged mountains running very political spirit. The Cascades not only are a barrier to moisture, but they also all the way from Chukotka to China. It was only along the inhospitable coast of the inhibit east-west transportation and trade. While the ports of the Pacific Gateway Okhotsk Sea that Russians easily dispersed weak native tribes and established their provide a linkage to Asia, the back door connection to the rest of the United States is original Pacific foothold in 1649. via highways that must chug up mountain passes or railroads that tunnel through some of the longest stretches in America. Easier connections are north and south to Alaska Farther north, the extreme remoteness of the Chukotka and Kamchatka peninsulas and California. Los Angeles is only 1000 miles from Seattle and Portland, but Chicago long hampered Russian control by their extreme remoteness. The Chukchis of is 2000 miles away; New York City, 3000. By air transportation, Anchorage is about Chukotka were eventually left to their own devices and enjoyed the distinction of being half the distance from Seattle as is the U.S. East coast. On the other hand, the ports of the Empire’s only officially “not fully pacified” people down to the 20th century. Fierce the Pacific Edge are favorably suited for trade with the “tigers” of Asia: Japan, South resistance of native Koryaks and Itelmens delayed Russian control of Kamchatka until 5 6 the reign of Peter the Great, when it became the base for exploring and claiming the Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. The great circle route on the globe shows that Seattle is American coast, most notably Alaska. The cruel climate of Alaska and the Far East the closest port to Tokyo in the coterminous United States. Face to the East prohibited cultivation and large-scale Russian settlement, though, increasing the lure of 'Once by the Pacific' The states of the region are relatively new: Oregon joined the union in 1859, the far warmer and inviting lands along the Amur river. But in the attempt to expand Aged stones and such face to the east, Washington in 1889, and Alaska only in 1959. We include a small portion of The shattered water made a misty din. Where rains are mixed with clay and the drain steep, south from the sea of Okhotsk Russians clashed with a matched rival - the Manchu northern California in our region, so it is the grandfather with statehood in 1850. Great waves looked over others coming in, Overflowing rivers and rice fields, Chinese Empire. In 1689, Russia retreated from the Amur, fixing the boundary with And thought of doing something to the shore But human habitation here dates back thousands of years. Members of the Native Where roads cannot bear up - so heavy is the earth. China along the Stanovoi range. Only in 1858 was then-weakened China forced to That water never did to land before. Even the stones and such always face to the east, American tribes of the Pacific Northwest probably witnessed the devastating eruption cede the almost unpopulated lands along the Amur and Ussuri rivers, which serve The clouds were low and hairy in the skies, Where waves pouring heavy as leaden slumber of Mount Mazama that formed Crater Lake in Oregon or even the Great Spokane Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes. as the Russo-Chinese boundary to our day. Since the Government was anxious to Rush over the buoy, spread across the breakwater flood of 15,000 years ago, believed by some to be one of the largest floods ever to You could not tell, and yet it looked as if onto the land consolidate the hold over the new provinces, thousands of settlers were encouraged to occur on the planet. The culture of Native Americans along the Pacific coast has been The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff, Split around the eyelid, fall down the face and die come and farm the fertile land. Still, in the Far East the Empire clearly overextended The cliff in being backed by continent; among the most highly developed on the continent. Despite years of decimation away... itself. Colonists could arrive overland, but commodities had to reach the Far East by It looked as if a night of dark intent And through the V-form of the cranes' flight, and impovershment thanks to the arrival of the Anglo population, tribal groups traversing half the globe in the ocean journey from Petersburg to Vladivostok. The Was coming, and not only a night, an age. The gunpowder mist melts over Sakhalin. are still evident in the economy and culture of the region. The Coast Salish and Someone had better be prepared for rage. region had to import a major share of its food supplies. Alaska was provisioned by Oregon Penutin tribes have connections to the Native Americans who extend up the There would be more than ocean-water broken ~Yury Kabankov, "Litsom na vostoke", from S. and therefore firmly tied to the United States, while the mainland Far East was largely coast through British Columbia and Southeast Alaska. Within Alaska itself, Native Before God's last 'Put out the Light' was Balabin and L. Knyazev, editors, Tikhookean- supplied with food (and manual labor) from neighboring Chinese Manchuria. Alaska spoken. Americans have made important economic inroads in terms of land claims, particularly skiy prioboy (Pacific Waves) collection, 1984, was sold to the United States in 1867. The logical Russian attempt to expand into Dal'nevostochnoye knizhnoe publishers, pp. 136- since the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. -- Robert Frost 137. Vladivostok. Manchuria clashed with similar designs by Japan, and this territory was lost as well in [translation by K. Braden] the Russo-Japanese war (1904-05). Early exploration and settlements by Europeans in this region extend back to the 16th century when Spain and England sent exploratory parties. The 1778 voyage of Russia’s bastion on the Pacific was hard won and is therefore gingerly guarded. Large James Cook from England, 1788 exploration of Robert Gray from Boston, and the portions of the region continue to be claimed by China or Japan (which attacked famous 1805-1806 Lewis and Clark expedition all marked the start of larger scale Russia in 1918-22 and in 1937) and the Far East long remained a fortress rather than a white movement into the Pacific Northwest. Meanwhile, Russian influence had been gateway to its neighbors. Vladivostok literally means “The Ruler of the East.” Military extending into the region since the late 1700s, when the first Russian settlement was concerns reigned supreme over economic development goals, especially due to the founded at Old Kodiak in Alaska. Russian fur traders, working with the native Aleut strategic importance of the Far East: the Arctic aside, this is Russia’s only outlet to the people and borrowing their skills in trapping sea otters, made their way down to open ocean. The huge naval bases in Petropavlovsk and Vladivostok are second only to California in search of food supplies for the Alaskan settlements. By the time Russia one in Murmansk. The military presence is highly visible, as sailors reportedly make up 7 8 10 percent of the population of Vladivostok and 40 percent in Nakhodka and sold the United States its claims in Alaska for eight million dollars in 1867, Russian Petropavlovsk. Separated from Russia by the huge expanse of the Land Ocean, the cultural presence was firmly on the landscape in places like Sitka and as far south as Pacific Edge is still something of a militarized “overseas” dependency. San Francisco. “Oregon Country” was claimed by Russia, Spain, France, England, and the United States, but by 1818 England and the United States were left to be the Throughout the Soviet period the Pacific Edge was persistently the fastest-growing real game players in the region, spurred on by the fur trade. Astoria, named for John region of the country, with a population expanding more than fivefold. Since the Jacob Astor of the American Fur Company, was established near the mouth of the 1960s, migration has been driven not so much by the earlier romantic appeal of the Columbia River. By the latter half of the 1800s, there was an uneasy joint occupancy last frontier as by the magnetic pull of high wages. Among the increasingly non-idealist of the region by the British and Americans, as well as a strong migration of pioneer generations of young Soviets, the region acquired the reputation of a “Promised Land,” agricultural settlers into the Willamette Valley. The Oregon Trail and Oregon Country where special wage incentives sometimes double what is paid for equivalent work became a major focal point of the great American westward flow of white people. in European Russia. The region drew those who were ready to tolerate temporary Portland, Seattle, and Tacoma were established settlements by the 1850s. Compromise deprivations for the sake of a good future life. Forfeiting their previous skills and in 1846 had determined that the U.S.- Canadian border should extend along the 49th prestigious professions, these people came to clean fish, to work as cooks on fishing parallel, thus cutting off British Columbia from inclusion in our region, although by trawlers, and to serve as cargo handlers in harbors or as general manual labor in climate, economy, and recent influx of Asians it may logically be considered part of the expeditions. Their sole goal was to save enough money to start a decent life back home. “Pacific Edge.” The international boundary also isolated a small piece of Washington But this image of a “Promised Land” proved to be misleading. Nowhere else in Russia State, Point Roberts, which can be entered by land only through Canada, and left was there so acute a housing crisis. In the smaller settlements in particular, many still undetermined the boundary around the San Juan islands, which became part of the live in makeshift shanties popularly known as “Shanghais.” The high proportion of United States much later when the German Emperor arbitrated the land dispute well-paid young people in the population makes especially intolerable the shortage between British and American islanders in 1872. of kindergarten facilities, movie theaters, or good consumer goods in stores. High With the advent of railroad connections to tie the young region with the rest of the wages also prove rather ephemeral due to a correspondingly high cost of living. For country, the friction of distance began to erode. From the 1880s to 1910 for example, many, the savings are just enough for an extended vacation and spending spree “back Washington Territory witnessed a 1400 percent growth in its population, a forewarning west,” and then they are forced back to try again. The influx of new waves of youths of philosophical battles over growth that would be repeated later in the century. The is counterbalanced by the out-migration of older people, mostly disillusioned former feeling of separatism from the rest of the United States has been strong in the Pacific enthusiasts no longer able to tolerate the unsettled and raw life in the region. Due Edge, and when Ernest Callenbach published a novel in 1975 hypothesizing the to this turnover of people, in recent decades the population grew only at the average secession of Oregon, Washington, and Northern California, it rang true to many national rate. Numerous temporary residents, mostly women, are recruited to work in people who wanted to keep their environmentalist values and utopian imagery of the fish processing plants during the season, from June to October, and leave afterwards. 9 10 The threads of migrational moves continue to tie the young and immature Pacific region intact. The name “Ecotopia” became popular, fed by the anti-growth sentiment frontier to European Russia. The residents are likely to have more friends and relatives that was perhaps most strong in Oregon. But the battle seems to be lost. “There in Moscow than within ten miles from home, and experience the region only as a are just too darned many people here now” is a complaint one hears frequently in remote and isolated outlier of European Russia. Portland and Seattle. Traffic jams regularly choke interstates that were once “overbuilt;” formerly pristine hiking trails fill like crowded streets on summer weekends; huge The “island” sense of psychological isolation is strengthened by the lack of cohesiveness new urban corridors are springing up around Portland and on the eastern side of Lake within the region. The more firmly settled Amur Lands are reliably linked to European Washington; and in the heart of Ecotopia, pollution is an ongoing problem. The final Russia by the TransSiberian railway and have developed as Pacific outcrop of Russia’s blow to the hideout region came with change in its geographic situation. The Pacific main settlement zone and diversified economy, lying beyond the emptiness of the Northwest has become a victim both of its own quality-of-life mythology and the post- Land Ocean. The populations of both Vladivostok and Khabarovsk have reached the industrial economic shift that has freed up the American population to locate in areas one-million mark. In contrast, the northern part of the region is dominated by small, once considered too remote. And when the variable of Pacific Rim boom economies in scattered, and isolated settlements linked only by air. All basic necessities for Chukotka, Asia are added in to the equation, it is clear that events outside the Northwest are still Kamchatka, Sakhalin, Kurile islands, and Magadan, as well as all regional exports, determining the fate of this utopia. pass through the seaports of Vladivostok, Nakhodka, Vostochnyi, and Soviet Harbor/ Vanino, where the TransSiberian terminates. The whole of the region clings closely to the Pacific, which binds together its parts and also accounts for the region’s importance to Russia. Shut off from the rest of the country by the Land Ocean, the region has long enjoyed a semi-autonomous island existence. Between 1920 and 1922 it was the nominally independent Far Eastern republic, created as a Russian buffer to thwart Japanese expansion. Afterwards, the nearly autonomous Far Eastern Territory preserved its own economic planning system as late as 1937. Even today, local residents acutely feel that they are islanders, usually referring to the European regions of Russia as the mainland, or the continent. Whether for Russia or Pacific investors, the region seems to still function as an island dependency in an economic sense.

11 12 THEME 1: CHASING A RIM OF GROWTH THEME 1: CHASING A RIM OF GROWTH As befits a dependency, the economy of the Far East focuses on the extraction of The story of jobs in the Pacific Edge of America is a journey from lumber mills to resources for outside markets, and, as befits an island, it is strongly linked to the sea. Nintendo games, and along the way, people could always find work building airplanes The principal treasure of the Far East has been fish. The region accounts for 40 percent or missiles. Trees, soil, fish, and minerals formed the first base for employment in of the national catch, and the fishing industry is its leading economic sector - in western Washington and Oregon, and raw materials still very much dominate the Kamchatka and Sakhalin fishing accounts for a staggering 55 to 75 percent of the value Alaskan economy. of industrial output. Yet most of the catch is limited to coastal waters, rather than the About 25 percent of the nation’s lumber comes from the Pacific region. While hemlock, nearby open ocean, and the fish reserves are severely overtaxed, not least by Japanese spruce, and cedar are important species, perhaps the one tree that symbolizes the timber poaching. industry in the Northwest more than any other is the Douglas fir, a coniferous species Another prime resource for exploitation has been timber, but many of the best that is not really a fir at all but can grow to 325 feet tall, with diameters up to seventeen species and easily accessible stands are tapped out. What remains is either larch (not a feet. Douglas fir provides about fifty percent of the annual harvest in the Northwest, prime commercial species) or forests on mountain slopes. A wood products industry thriving in the climate to become a favored species for regrowth in the tree plantations commensurate with the resource size has not been established, thus limiting the that supply much of the mill and export logs for the region. economic value of the wood cut. Trade with Japan, which originally purchased much of The timber industry may be the founding heart activity of the Pacific Edge. For over the raw log exports from the Far East, has become more limited as the most desirable one hundred years, the forests of western Washington, Oregon, and northern California species are exhausted. Much wood is harvested in a reckless manner, and foreign provided an apparently unending supply of huge-diameter, original growth, and investors from South Korea and the United States have met opposition to logging from second-growth trees. But in the 1990s, it looks as if the party is over, and many people Native Siberian groups and environmental organizations. in towns that depend on the trees are feeling the impending loss of their employment The gift of ancient volcanoes (non-ferrous metals, especially tin) is another source of base. The controversy over logging the remaining original forest is representative of wealth, but the extent of mining is not at all comparable to the huge operations in the the changing identity of the region, in what has come to be billed as the fight between Land Ocean. Although the region has long been known to possess coal and oil, local logger and environmentalist. The trees of the Northwest also point to the importance production accounts for only one fifth of regional needs. Both coal and oil are mostly of trade with Japan and other countries of the fast-growing Pacific Rim. About forty found in the north of Sakhalin island, with major new oil and natural gas fields located percent of logs cut in Washington, for example, have been exported yearly to markets offshore in the Sea of Okhotsk, clad in ice for most of the year and frequently stormy. in Japan. While many regions of the United States complain about jobs lost to Asia, Thus far Russia has failed to develop these offshore fields without western technology. the Northwest has benefitted as Japan, Taiwan, China, and South Korea absolutely Overall, the share of the region in Russia’s industrial output and exports is well lower dominate the turnover in trade through Seattle, Portland, and other port cities. 13 14 than its proportion of population. Local production of consumer goods is able to meet Colored strips of imported Asian cars cover Seattle’s waterfront piers; banks and trading only 30 percent of the region’s needs and half of its food is imported. The geopolitical companies that specialize in Asia bring money into the Northwest economy. Small importance of the outpost region has led the Russian government to subsidize up to wonder that when the Seattle baseball franchise fell under ownership by Nintendo, the a third of regional spending. Since the Soviet economic system tended to underprice main complaints about Japanese purchase of an American institution like baseball were major imports into the area, such as fuels, foodstuffs, and especially labor, the huge heard largely from outside the region. expenses of creating a workplace, building housing for volatile migrants, and paying Hard feelings have evolved over the years, however, regarding fishing disputes between higher wages necessary to attract a workforce were mostly borne by other regions. As Asian countries and Northwest companies in the Pacific. Many of the original salmon Russia’s switch to a market economy stopped the flow of subsidies, most businesses runs are threatened or gone, and much of the focus of the fishing sector has moved on could not afford to pay higher wages themselves, and residents who came here for to Alaskan waters. Similar to problems in managing forest resources, arguments abound big money started leaving in droves. The current crisis underscores not only that over who has the right to take salmon; from questions over guarantees made by treaty investment in this region is proving risky due to organized crime and a chaotic to the Native Americans (for whom the salmon is as important part of traditional economy, but also that the Far East was a money-losing dependency of Russia, not a culture and spirituality), to international conflicts with Japanese fishing interests. profitable resource colony. When voices are added to the fray from commercial and sports fishers, from users of These hard times are especially ironic since the region was viewed earlier by the Soviet hydropower produced by the Columbia, and from farmers depending on irrigation government as a gateway, a hinge linking their economy to the dynamic Pacific Rim. waters in the eastern portions of the states, the salmon hardly have a chance. The fish To facilitate Russia’s entry into the “Pacific Age,” projects such as BAM (Baikal with the romantic names like sockeye and chinook, who hold so firmly to their home Amur Mainline railroad) were undertaken in the 1970s to create a new Siberian land beacon, have proved no match for human competition. bridge linking the Pacific and Europe. During the world oil crisis of the same period, Manufacturing has always played a smaller role in the region’s economy. Distance from prospects looked bright for the development of the Far East as a resource frontier for major market centers has tended to limit industry only to that related to resources, capital-rich but resource-poor Pacific Rim economies. A number of resource projects such as lumber mills or canneries, or to specialized production not directly tied were conceived jointly with Japan, including timber harvesting and processing as to transportation. But in Washington State manufacturing bears the name of one well as oil and liquified natural gas production in Sakhalin for the Japanese market. company: Boeing, which has dominated local industrial employment more intensely Most big hopes of the period were dashed with the onset of post-oil-crisis resource- than any other comparable example for manufacturing in U.S. cities. By 1970, as a saving technologies that dramatically devalued primary materials and reduced the result of a downturn in demand for airplanes, Boeing laid off 65,000 workers within attractiveness of investment in resource projects. Also, in comparison with Canada or two years, putting a dent in the city’s economic base that was to affect urban planning Australia, the Soviet Far East simply is not the most attractive of resource frontiers in in Seattle for many years ahead. The city swore it would never again be so addicted to the Pacific Rim. The ebullient perception of the Far East as a potential Klondike, 15 16 widespread among Russians, is but a misleading exaggeration. In this region, the one company, and began a program to diversify its work force. Today, Boeing is still the potential and the actual always seem to be at odds. main game in town in terms of the manufacturing work force in the region. Compared to Seattle, Portland has always been more diverse in its manufacturing employment, The Pacific Edge of Russia is still a young frontier in the early rude stage of relying on wood products, transportation equipment, and machinery companies. development. Its population of 5.5 million, clinging to the international line is completely overshadowed by its neighbors: about 120 million in Japan, 60 million in Geographers and economists studying the urban economies of the Pacific Edge had Korea and 90 million in the Manchurian provinces of China. Nowadays, with always subscribed to traditional theories that held to the notion that manufacturing would remote Russia in disarray and the economy liberalizing, these realities of geography provide a major export base for a region’s economy. Despite the downturn in timber, prompt the Pacific Edge to trade the old idea of a hinge between Russia and Pacific fishing, and some manufacturing, the region gained jobs in services and there was a Rim for one-way integration into the latter. Following the example of the economically- boom in downtown office construction. Where were the jobs coming from? Reports aggressive “Tigers of Asia” (such as Hong Kong and South Korea) the Far East became suggest that transportation and trade, communications, finance, and business services home to Russia’s first free economic zone in Nakhodka, and the whole of Sakhalin are bringing money into the region. What has come to be known as the “Post Industrial Island enjoys a special status of “economic homerule.” The region is Russia’s leader in Economy” nationally is already apparent in the Pacific Northwest, with markets in the development of transborder barter trade, especially along the Chinese boundary. other western states, in Europe, and particularly in Asia. By the end of the 1980s, Asia Special economic zones are being created on the Chinese side of the international line was providing 43 percent of imports into the United States and buying 31 percent to take advantage of commerce with Russia, the largest of them being across the Amur of American exports, and the ports and businesses of America’s Pacific Edge were big River from Blagoveshensk. The two banks of the city are now linked for the first time beneficiaries of this growth spurt. Added to these connections was the location of “high by power and telephone lines and a railway crossing. The United Nations is financing tech” activities in the Seattle and Portland metropolitan areas, particularly computer a project that plans to bring together the comparative advantages of Russian natural software firms such as Microsoft, recreational firms like Nintendo, and biotechnology resources, Chinese labor, and technology from Japan and South Korea to undertake and genetic engineering companies. manufacturing for export. China and North Korea are regarded as potential sources of labor for the chronically underpeopled region, especially for achieving food self- sufficiency, and the first groups of Asian farmers are already tilling land in the Maritime territory. Yet even as the region’s hopes to join the Pacific club are revived, it can be admitted only as a semi-colonial resource appendage. Choosing new masters will hardly bring rapid prosperity. Thus far, Pacific integration is most visible in the terms of 17 18 automobiles and videocassette recorders for sale in Far Eastern cities. In most cases the THEME 2: LIVING ON A RING OF FIRE worthless cars are traded for precious natural resources in shady deals by mushrooming The Pacific Northwest may be at the “edge” of the continental United States, but local businesses that operate in the gray zone between law and crime. The region is geologically it is at the center of action. Volcanoes, mountains, and earthquakes gripped by the “grab and go” spirit of unbridled speculation. As a result, crime has all provide evidence of the region’s belonging to the Pacific Ring of Fire, a rim of skyrocketed, particularly street robberies and burglaries, and it is not uncommon for seismically active zones around the Pacific Ocean Basin. The Pacific Edge is one of the foreign business investors to hire armed guards to protect equipment deliveries. Some few places in America where someone can actually see geologic processes happening. regard the system of pay-offs as a necessary expense, and perhaps a more serious damper The result has been a place of both incredible natural beauty and deadly attraction. on investment is the uncertainty of the business climate along the Pacific Edge. This environment of fire and ice can be traced back to the Pacific Ocean plates, riding on a crust of magma. Off the coasts of Washington and Oregon lies an oceanic trench, THEME 2: LIVING ON A RING OF FIRE swallowing up seafloor crust at a rate of 2 to 3 inches per year. As the North American In its attempt to become a prosperous gateway, the region may well lose its most continent drifts westward, the Pacific Plate slips into this trench. There was a time valuable asset, that of being the remote refuge of nearly pristine nature. Foreign wood when you could own Pacific beachfront property in Spokane - if you were around a few products companies have already invaded the forests of the region, with North Korean hundred million years ago. operations in Amur Oblast already accused by Russian environmentalists of severe The microcontinent that formed the North Cascades sailed across the Pacific fifty overcutting, and U.S. companies interested in tapping into the remaining tracts of million years ago, bringing with it the volcanoes that were to form the classic peaks. trees. Wild animal populations are experiencing increased pressures as well: having Along a line parallel to the ocean trench a series of fire breathers grew out of the discovered the high value of bear bile on the Japanese market, poachers killed 2000 mountains - the stratovolcanoes of the Cascades, formed by alternating layers of lava bears in Kamchatka just in the summer of 1992, frequently not even bothering to take and debris thrown violently out of the mouth to create giant cones on the landscape. the animals’ hides. Considering that the entire bear population of Kamchatka barely One of the most striking of these may have been Mount Mazama in Oregon, 9,000 exceeds 10,000, the consequences can be dramatic. This case is typical: the rootless to 11,000 feet high. About seven thousand years ago, Mazama blew its stack in an population that has gathered in the region in search of fast money is ruthless in pursuit eruption so huge it resulted in a caldera- a collapsed cone. As water seeped in, it of a new Klondike, and is quite willing to sell to the highest bidder not just their became one of the most beautiful sights in the northwest - Crater Lake. The most labor but also the region’s unique natural wealth. For all its immense area, the region recent example of the dangers of life among the volcanoes has been the May 18, has little room to reconcile its Gateway and Getaway functions. Hortensia, a typical 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens in southern Washington. The blowout took the domestic plant in European Russia, circles tree trunks up to the tops. In the wild forests lives of thousands of animals and more than 30 human beings, in an explosion that of Sikhote-Alin, you can still hear the growling of the Ussuri tiger under the larches. released the equivalent energy of 21,000 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. People in the Kamchatka boasts fur seal breeding grounds on Kommodore Islands and bird rookeries Northwest watched the whole event on their televisions. 19 along the coast. 20 The desire to preserve these unique environments led to the creation in the Pacific The mountains of the Northwest are a prime influence on the region’s vegetation Edge of some of Russia’s largest nature reserves. The 934,000-hectare (>2 million and climate. Washington State has one of the few mid-latitude rainforests in the acres) Kronotskiy reserve on Kamchatka protects native sable which had been world due to the odd juxtaposition of westerly winds off the Pacific and the Olympic overhunted. The reserve contains sixteen spectacular snow-covered volcanoes such as Mountain range. As the rains from the Pacific slam into the mountains, precipitation Krasheninnikov and Kronotskaya Sopka. The warmth of the underlying strata heats may reach more than 200 inches of rain per year, creating moist conditions conducive up the waters of some lakes in the reserve to the point where they do not freeze even to the growth of huge cedar and hemlock trees. The coast range of Oregon is not as in the harsh winter, and plant life as well as animals flourish around these natural hot high as the Olympics, and thus, Portland’s climate is slightly hotter and drier than tubs. But perhaps the most famous feature of the reserve is the Valley of the Geysers, Seattle’s. The lack of major mountains and a relatively gentle coastline have resulted in not even “discovered” by scientists until 1941. While the whole valley churns and a region more welcoming to visitors. If you compare the Pacific coast of Washington steams with hot springs and twenty-two major geysers, the most famous are “Velikan” on a map with that of Oregon, you might wonder why all the development seems to (the Giant), which explodes water every five hours, and “Fontan” (the Fountain), which have clustered along the Oregon coast. Indeed, Saturday night in Seaside, Oregon, is sends out a jet of water five stories high. probably as raucous with teenagers as any city in the Northwest, and many towns along the coast have drawn a livelihood from tourism. Any misstep can destroy the fragile environmental balance, and indeed the region provides examples of both Russian early environmental protection and thoughtless But the state of Alaska has no rival in North America when it comes to real mountains. “frontiersmen” exploiting the “unlimited bounty” of nature. In Kamchatka, marshes From the Brooks Range in the north to the 20,000 foot high St. Elias Mountains rising have been drained to increase agricultural areas, which, along with lumber operations, straight out of the sea in the south, Alaska is a marvel of fire and ice. Volcanoes such as pronounces a death sentence on the salmon nursery grounds - the main treasure of Mt. Iliama are quite active, and Alaska has witnessed some of the strongest earthquakes the area. The All Terrain Vehicles and caterpillars used by geologists and the military in the United States in modern times, such as the March 27, 1964, earthquake of more leave scars on the landscape that take five or six years to heal. The destroyed vegetation than 8 on the Richter scale, centered near Valdez. undercuts the foodbase of small rodents who are in turn the main food of the sable and The value of nature has been recognized by the abundance of federal and state land fox populations. It has been reported that in Kamchatka alone there are about 12,000 preserves of various types in the region. In Washington and Oregon there are four of these so-called “geologists’ paths.” national parks (Mt. Rainier, Crater Lake, Olympic, and North Cascades), while Alaska But nature here can turn the tables and be threatening as well to human inhabitants has eight, including Denali, Wrangell-St. Elias, and Gates of the Arctic, the three of the Far East. Just as the sea forms the identity of the Far East, its landscape largest in the national park system in terms of acreage. The national Wilderness Act of is dominated by the mountains. There are about thirty active volcanoes just on 1984 reserved even more land in the Pacific Northwest, and created a distinct category Kamchatka, and the Kuriles are simply a chain of partially submerged volcanoes. The because only areas “unaffected by human use” can be included. People are regarded as great volcanoes, such as Avachinskiy, Karymskiy, Shiveluch, and Klyuchevskoi (which rare visitors in these areas. Environmentalists complain that too little land has been 21 22 rival the perfect beauty of Fujiyama’s cone), are objects of unconscious worship by the preserved under this policy; others feel that too much land is being locked up that Far Easterners, who speak of them as if they are living beings. The violent explosion could otherwise be used successfully on a multiuse basis. Also in the 1980s, the of volcano Bezimyannyi (“Nameless”) in 1956 blew off the volcano’s top in a manner Columbia Gorge was added to the nation’s list of wild and scenic rivers. Development resembling the later famous Mt. St. Helens event. Tsunami waves and tropical versus preservation is a constant battle on this beautiful section of the Columbia. typhoons with their devastating effects are not infrequent visitors to the region as well. The Oregon side alone already enjoyed 27 state parks, and the stretch of river from Hoodsport to the Dalles is considered one of the premiere windsurfing paradises in The Russian expression “Life on Volcano” is not just metaphorical along the Pacific North America. Edge, and the allusion to the European Russia as the “firm earth” is not merely a reflection of local “islander” mentality, but also a comparison to their own ground, People on the Pacific Edge seem to take full advantage of life on a ring of fire, and the which indeed frequently trembles. People live here endangered by all four great beauty of the natural environment may be dooming the area to a continued battle over elements of nature - earth, water, air, and fire - and equally insecure in their alternating growth. The region’s service as front door to the Pacific is booming, and as most of the roles as defenders of Russia’s outpost or inhabitants of a new colony thrown wide local economy remains strong and the region’s national image so positive, new people open. The region is as young and rudely chiseled as its ferocious volcanoes, and just as keep drifting in - for jobs, for the excitement of living in young states, for a chance to unsteady on its feet. sip espresso on the waterfront after work and climb the Cascade peaks on weekends. It is not the cobwebbed corner of America any longer. Perhaps there has never been a place which has had such mixed feelings about its own success.

23 24 CONCLUSION Kathleen Braden

“There are at the present time two great nations in the world which seem to tend toward the same end, although they started from different points: I allude to the Russians and Americans...their starting point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.” -Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

We began this book by claiming it was an experiment in Geography to understand two large states by comparing their component regions. We therefore had to decide what to include and compare, and what places to exclude. Our Russian and American team of geographers found little trouble in seeing elements of New York on Moscow’s streets, picturing Siberia’s open space and the great American West as mirror images, and finding pieces of Vermont just northeast of St. Petersburg. But when we sat back at our meetings, closed our eyes, and imagined California, we saw, well...California.

1 THE PLACES WE LEFT OUT

The places excluded from our new geography help explain why the eleven regions we did include form such strong parallels. They also remind us about the organic nature of boundaries and the fact that people will find ways to adjust to and overcome political borders, living instead within the true lines that define everyday life and culture. California The authors could find no legitimate Russian counterpart to California,although the suggestion was made that had Russia held onto Manchuria, it may have evolved into an apt parallel. We borrowed only a small portion of southern California for the Mexistan region, so what makes California largely un-pairable? With its size, economic strength, and agricultural richness, the state could stand on its own as an independent country. Twelve percent of the people in the United States live in California, and despite recent economic troubles, California puts out a remarkably large share of American farming and industrial products. Yet perhaps what Makes California so unique is the fact that it best represents the United States of the future. The mixture of people who have converged in California give a demographic preview of the United States of the 21st century, when less Americans than ever before will be of white European ancestry, and people of color or of Hispanic origins will form a significant share of the American profile. This state already receives the major portion of new immigrants coming from Asia and Latin America. In the twentieth century, American culture is being exported all over the world, and most of that culture has been born in California. Los Angeles, with almost 15 million people in its greater urban area, is reaching out beyond the United States and becoming a leading city of the new Pacific Rim world region. In short, California suggested no Russian counterpart to us because it is a phenomenon as much as a place, and has no parallels anywhere in the world. 2 The Baltic States, Western Ukraine, Moldova The fluidity of culture and borders was apparent when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics split up, new political units formed, and fifteen independent countries emerged. Yet the outward wave of Slavic society and influence did not quickly recede, and greater “Rossiya” is still alive along the border republics which we have included in the book, such as Belorus and Kazakhstan. On the other hand, when the authors designed the book’s scheme of regions, we excluded the Baltic Republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia from the start. In part this choice represented the recentness and controversy surrounding their incorporation into the USSR in 1940, but the decision to exclude them had as much to do with their cultural and historic differences from Russia. Lithuania itself for many centuries formed its own empire at the western edge of Russia; Estonian culture has more in common with that of Finland; and Latvia is a place of ancient Baltic traditions. With independence, the three republics have looked more toward economic integration with Europe, although Estonia retains a large and restless Russian population. Western Ukraine bears little resemblance to the South of our book that includes eastern Ukraine, let alone to Russian territory. The religion here is Catholic, and the historic orientation toward the Central Europe of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that once incorporated its lands. Moldova likewise was taken into the USSR relatively late (1940) although as “Bessarabia”, its ancient name, it had been acquired by the tsars in the nineteenth century. Romanian culture dominates here, despite the presence of a significant Russian population with periodic suggestions of secession of the eastern edge from the Moldovan state. Caucasus It was not hard to give up immediately trying to find an American counterpart for 3 territory in the Caucasus republics (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan). With the exception of the narrow coastal strip of Georgia we include in the Tropical South, the Caucasus are another peripheral zone separate to itself, despite years of inclusion within the USSR. We also excluded the Caucasian internal republics of Russia just across the mountains, such as Chechenya and Ingushetia. The people in all these areas live in what may be one of the most complex cultural regions of the world, where linguistic, historic, and religious differences all clash. Warfare has been a major feature of this zone of collision, with periodic fighting between Chechens and Russians, Chechens and Ingush, Abkhazians and Georgians, and Azeris and Armenians over control of territory. Central Asia In the lands south of Kazakhstan, a new consciousness is emerging for the people of Uzbekistan, southern Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan who increasingly see themselves in terms of their own native heritage or as part of a greater Islamic or reborn Turkic world. Therefore, these places seem un-pairable with any counterpart in the United States, and indeed, seemed inevitably to be detaching from the USSR even at the start of our project. Tajikstan, with its Persian cultural heritage, has been engaged in fierce civil warfare, and Russia has not yet totally abandoned its influence on the region. The imprint of the communist era is still felt here in terms of the political background of some of its political leadership, the economic structure, and potential commercial ties back to Moscow. Yet culturally, the Russian realm is receding, and even the Cyrillic alphabet may soon be an historic artifact on the landscape. All these regions did not fit into our book plan not only because they were essentially unpairable with a counterpart, but also because they did not fit into the heart identity of a new geography of Russia and America. They are places out of synch with time as well as territory. Just as California may represent the identity of America in the future, the former USSR republics we excluded were part of the past: a state held together ever so tentatively by a notion of a union “soviet” or a tsarist empire. Whether the borders 4 of that unit pulse outward again in the future has been less a question here than the core identity of what is and will stay as “Russia.”

THE LAST PLACE

But there is one region left to explain on our Russian and American maps, and it is perhaps unique, even to a greater degree than California. The region where the borders of the two countries actually meet along the Bering Sea is an elephant’s graveyard of boundaries. Here, the lines of longitude which define east and west on the planet begin a frantic convergence toward the poles. Only here did a geologic bridge once unite the two huge landmasses; and in this region geography shows its best irony as the Aleutian island chain goes so far west that Attu Island spills over the 180th meridian and gives Alaska the odd distinction of being both the easternmost and westernmost state in the United States. Even time itself gets converted by an odd boundary in this place as the international dateline turns Russia’s Monday into America’s Sunday. In this region of strange geographies, Russia and the United States almost touch, with only three miles separating Big and Little Diomede Islands. There are no mirror regions here, only a territory in the Bering Sea where all that has both divided and unified Russia and America has been played out. In 1942, the two World War 2 allies exchanged lend-lease planes across the Alaska-Aiberian route, and by the end of the war, Soviet pilots had flown almost 8,000 U.S. airplanes to Russia; yet, merely a few years later in 1948, the line between the two countries became a wall, and the Cold War closed the touchpoint, isolating native communities who had always lived along these borders. The bonds in this region between America and Asia went back even longer than the lifetime of the local people; in fact, 15,000 years ago, ice formed a link here and people 5 from Asia traveled that landbridge which was one-thousand miles wide and claimed a new world. The people who live here today from the Chuckchi of Siberia to the Inuit of Alaska to the decimated Yukaghirs of the Russian Far East, recently saw a reforming of the ancient linkage - this time by air as Alaska Airlines in 1988 reestablished the route that was severed by the Cold War. Yupiks from Nome flew to Provideniya in Russia to reclaim their connections with the people of Siberia. Americans may be unaware of how many times Russia reached out across that frozen sea. The Russian explorer Simon Dezhnev was the first white man to traverse the water between the two continents. Vitrus Bering, for whom the Bering Strait was named, traveled in the name of the Russian empire, and Alexei Chirikov explored the region in 1741, followed then by a litany of Russian, British, and American seagoers. Russian fur traders and priests left behind a heritage of onion-domed churches along the Alaskan coast. When Count Nikolai Rezanov determined that his fur traders in Alaska were starving, he tried to extend his empire’s food search all the way to California where Fort Ross was established in 1812 (with far more native Alaskans in residence than Russians). Even today, services at St. Michael’s in Sitka, Alaska are given in Russian, English, and Tlingit. Some of the earliest joint ventures between Russia and America were fishing activities that plied the waters of the Bering Sea, and commercial airline flights as well as tourists now fly the arc that unites the two countries. Non-human inhabitants also persist in overcoming the international border. Every year, 25,000 snow geese from Wrangel Island leave their breeding grounds and fly to distant Washington State for winter break. Cooperative Russian and American scientific work in the Bering Sea and Arctic area focus on polar bear, sea lion, whales, and walruses. An international park has been proposed between western Alaska and eastern Chukhota to unite Russian and American efforts to protect the special cultural and wildlife heritage of the Bering Sea bridge.

6 Our portrait of Russia and America then may end at this last place where two continents touch and lines defining entire hemispheres and even time itself are drawn in confidence not by nature, but by human convention. But the sureness with which past borders on the globe have been rendered is giving way to puzzlement, and the geography of tomorrow may seem more and more beyond the understanding of most people. With a North American Free Trade Agreement that breaks down boundaries between the neighbors of the western hemisphere and threatened civil wars of secession to trouble Russia, the permanence of borders may increasingly be a comfortable illusion. Perhaps the best way to make sense of a world map that seems to be a moving target is to understand the real regions that people create through their common lives together. At best, the rest may be just lines on a piece of paper.

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